Pleasantview Extras: The Thorn Merchant

  This is the poem that influenced the title. Its cadence and subject matter really fit the story for me (I'm thinking of one character in particular who we haven't met just yet that the poem fits very well). I named the lake that Pleasantview appears to sit on in the neighborhood screen (and of course, the lake that was searched for Bella's body) in honor of the poem. Hence the title of the story. The poem is Yusef Komunyaka's The Thorn Merchant:

There are teeth marks
on everything he loves.
When he enters the long room
more solemn than a threadbare Joseph coat,
the Minister of Hard Knocks & Golden Keys
begins to shuffle his feet.
The ink on contracts disappears.
Another stool pigeon leans
over a wrought-iron balcony.
Blood money's at work.
While men in black wetsuits
drag Blue Lake, his hands dally
at the hem of his daughter's skirt.

In the brain's shooting gallery
he goes down real slow.
His heart suspended in a mirror,
shadow of a crow over a lake.
With his fingers around his throat
he moans like a statue
of straw on a hillside.
Ready to auction off his hands
to the highest bidder,
he knows how death waits
in us like a light switch.

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