Poetry Month: Florida Man

April is Poetry Month so every Saturday we are featuring one of the poems from Gerald So's crime poetry site, the 5-2. The poem "Florida Man" by Peter M. Gordon just struck me, so I had to share it. The author of "Florida Man", Peter M. Gordon, has published over 100 poems in publications such as Slipstream, the Journal of Florida Literature, Poetry Breakfast, and others. He is the author of two collections: Two Car Garage and Let's Play Two: Poems about Baseball. Peter earned a BA from Yale and MFA from Carnegie-Mellon, and teaches in Full Sail University's Film Production MFA program. 

- Deborah Lacy

FLORIDA MAN by Peter M. Gordon

When breathing air feels like drinking swamp water

and sweat falls unevaporated to sizzle on sidewalks

Florida Man emerges, to start a fight in a pizza joint

when wrong cheese is applied to his garlic knots.

Florida Man provides pot and ecstasy to reward his

children for good grades. Florida Man writes his cell

phone number and address on the stickup note to

make it easy for the teller to send more money after

the robbery. Only Florida Man snorts bath salts and meth,

walks next door to bludgeon his neighbors and eat their flesh

raw, in their driveway, where everyone can see him.

Perhaps it’s this thumb-shaped peninsula’s fault, the

right-angled thrust into the Atlantic that causes lightning

to clash over its center, illuminating all our dark places,

that makes us all a little bit Florida Man, waiting for the

weight of sin to sink our sandbar into primordial swamp.

Here Peter is reading his poem.