Ballad of a Hit Man

"Thinking it might be time to put away the guns and bullets..."

Mind Wave (Cloud Walk) by Ned Mudd

Ballad of a Hit Man

and so it goes
   arcane pictograms
   motion detectors
a far-flung story
   about drunken horses
the naked girl with green tattoos

all in a dream?
   no — it was not all in a dream
the doors blowing open
   birds sailing through the house

clogged arteries
   jammed with rusting cars
   the idle words of madmen
their spent cartridges
   scattering the highway

trying not to say the word blood
   for twenty-four hours
   irony a facile piece of work

hearing a famous man
   say he couldn’t go on
   the world too much to bear

and thinking it might be time
   to put away the guns and bullets
leave the killing
   to somebody else.

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Ballad of a Hit Man first appeared in Bardo, published in 2018. Contact Ned Mudd at nedmudd@me.com for copies.

Ned Mudd resides in Alabama where he engages in interspecies communication, rock collecting, and frequent cloud watching. He is the author of The Adventures of Dink and DVD (a space age comedy). Some of Ned’s best friends are raccoons.

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