Issue 4:1 I Poetry I Victor M. Depta

Mountain People

by Victor M. Depta

                  (originally published in Azrael on the Mountain)  

What is this shit about always attacking mountain people?  Look at

Tibet and all them Lamas and those Chechnians and Kurds and them Colombians growing cocaine plants—hell, the rednecks in the Ozarks, only what they got I don’t know, and the marihoochie growers out there in the redwood mountains.

I know what I’m talking about.  I got the Internet.  Anything you want

to find out about, go to there—stupid names, Google and Yahoo, and they think us hillbillies talk like retards—how about the EPA and the DEP and the OSM and the AML

but mountain people—the flatland people can’t leave them alone—

there’s the Chinese and the Russians and the Iraqians or

whoever and the drug czar and the drug lord where there ain’t nothing but poor people growing poppies and Coca-Cola plants, not to mention some real fine hemp I smoked from eastern Kentucky, easing the dry-mouth with a moonshine clear as water and chasing it with a Diet Pepsi

and if you think I don’t know what I’m talking about, drive down to

southern West Virginia, get off Interstate 77, get yourself lost in

Logan or Boone County—go visit ”Big John” sitting up there

on the mountain.

There’s a war you don’t even know about, which makes me wonder

where’s CNN when you need it—only there ain’t no fighter jets, helicopters, tanks, land mines, mortars and rifles.  The dynamite, dozers, cranes and eighteen-wheelers are enough.  And I know who the enemy is—you want some names?—how about Hobet Mining, Arch Coal Incorporated, Dal-Tex and A.T. Massey Coal, not to mention 99% of the assholes at the capitol in Charleston.

The idiots—if I was running things, I’d set up refugee camps in Ohio,

Virginia and North Carolina, drag all the people out of those six or seven counties in the southern part of the state and go at it—get that frigging coal once and for all and be done with it. So what the place would look like Iowa?  What’s wrong with Iowa? 

But no.  The environmentalists have to whine—who gives a damn

about the environment—you can’t eat it, drink it or get a paycheck from it—and the outsiders—mostly from places like Boston—wail and weep about the mountain people being exploited when it’s the dumb-fuck mountain people who vote those politician in—the ones who can’t see further than the cheeks of the coal operators they’ve got their noses in the cracks of.

My plan will work.  Get the mountain people out of there.  Deport the

suckers and take the mountains down a seam at a time till the

Grand Canyon’s no comparison to how low we can get—the

rains will fill it and then we’ll have a Great Lakes of the Appa-

lachians with the consistency of hotdog mustard.   Get the coal.

Get this stupid problem over with.  I’m sick of it. 

Speaking of sick, anybody got any asthma problems lately, any skin

cancer problems, any acid rain?  Ever haul a deer out of a

slurry pond?  Ever see a belt-mine, or a man’s arm tore off

when the belt breaks?  Ever see a headless man in a slate fall?

What about driving on the Blue Ridge Parkway, you flatland

tourists.  Do you see anything past the yellow-gray shit you

created?