Nick Brisini has written the poem Appalachian Fire. Below is a video of him doing another poetry reading.
Discarded snuff cans, empty beer bottles line back roads to a cold hell below.
In the mines of Appalachia men and women worked and some died.
Others spent their final days gasping for breath.
Then the mines shut down sounding like a shotgun blast in the night.
Leaving a burning emptiness.
Like a life lived in ramshackle taverns and bars,
With nowhere to call home.
In a broken shack.
2 miles from desolation row.
Some broken down men jam needles into their arms.
Hoping for hope into a world where there was none.
With holes in their pants and blood on their lips.
They stagger like drunk corpses.
Across a barren landscape of mud and debris and tendrils from the ground wrap around their legs/
Over yonder, a young woman her face painted like a Parisian woman of the night.
bumps and grinds on a crumbling stage at a topless bar called frozen souls called Frozen Souls.
Moving to the music that sounds like an assembly line in crisis.
Her child, fatherless and slow must eat like everyone else
as calloused hands, sweating like a demon with no heart
stick dollar bills into her g-string.
Her body is there but her mind is on another plane
Far away from Appalachia,
Far away from planet earth.
Appalachian Fire.
Barbed wire.
She has no use for a Bible thumping liar as the band played on,
To visit the Mine Wars Museum when miners, some armed took matters into their own hands and fought back against the coal bosses and the state government dropped bombs on them in the great war to make the world safe for hypocrisy.
The Battle of Blair Mountain should be etched into the minds of all who cherish justice like a man lost in a desert cherishes water.
Thunder may rumble and all of us may stumble but the struggle goes on as night becomes the dawn.