Hi, I'm Phil Jarrett, the author and copyright holder of the sequence of poems posted on my blog today.

Someone got me thinking about growing up in poverty in West Virginia so I published the toys you never won growing up in Chespeake, West Virginia on the Kanawha River in the 'Fifties.  and that one led to a poem after the Sego Mine Murders The Ghost of These Dark Hills.  After came the one about my spiritual journey from the hard work and drudgerly obeisance to religion to the peace of atheism....when green the grass did grow around the fumble of deire and after that it was all a blurr...it's a good poem and I used the title for my last book.  Then there's my personal favorites about an aging sex offender on home confinement looking at a young girl on the street called the coin that you pay with is one you once tossed showing the worst way of punishing a sex offender is to let  nature take its course.  Prison bars and all that jazz.  Just let them get old like the rest of us.  So old they begin to question what all the fuss and bother was about anyway.  I'm all for a Penal Colony...or, in this case, a Penis Colony.  

One more then I'll stop posting.  This is called 'hey, cowboy, let me see your fact' and comes from the winter of '69 in Charleston, West Virginia waiting for the Greyhond to take me to Nashville.  I'm looking for a place to pick up a pack of smokes and there's a cigar store across Summers from station so I drudge over there in my squishing Dingos in the slos and the stone.  I'm earing jeans, boots, a leather jacket I had name Sh'boa after a snake from an African legend.  I'm wearing a Dickies workshit and a flat brimmed, Mississippi gamblers hat tied tight around my ears with a red bandana and framing my beard and moustach and the Marlboro dripping from my lips.

When I emerged from the slush to the sidewalk, right there in front of me, in this floor to ceiling showroom window is a cut out of the Marlboro man and my reflection in the glass of the window moved slightly to the left and I found myself floating over the cut out like I was a spirit seeking to be released.  I stared at him and, maybe he stared back but his stetson was pulled too low over his eyes to see in the shadow where the direction of his gaze fell.  So I looked at this cardboy cowboy and I said, the arrogance and irritation of the young;

Hey, Cowboy, let me see your face.