Crossout Poetry Reversed

 
I, Joe Cock,
Have stars
in my eyes
Stars at my feet

Sweethearts
Spread out
Gaze on cock
I lie back

To watch the Milky Way
The starscape is vaster than
The musty scent,
That spicy aroma

Stars above,
Stars below
Set near the foothills of
Gold

Gold
Bypassed the town
Misfortune became
Extant

A reverses cross-out, but not a complete inversion

 

I met this old man down at the market flipping fish. He said, “my name is Joe Cock. I have stars in my eyes and stars at my feet.” I puzzled at the meaning of that. One day when out walking with sweethearts at night just after one of those summer rainstorms with electricity still cracking in the air, I gazed down at the street wet in oily slicks and noticed spread out on the ground stars. The pinpoints didn’t come from beyond the sky but were much more local. I smiled as I gazed on Joe Cock’s apocalyptic moment

In the summer, I get away on the high plains where the air is crisp and clear. I like to lie back and lounge against a log. To watch the Milky Way churn across the cosmos through holes in the canopy of Lodgepole Pine. The star-scape is vaster than the sea of juniper and sage I waded through to reach this grove. The musty scent of a skunk blew in from a crow sprayed by that creature’s spicy aroma.

The stars above are street lamps. The stars below are the reflections an old man sees with a back bent double from a century of work on his way home trudging up hills in the rain.

He told me of his home. The sun set near the foothills of Gold Mountain. As a boy and then a man he dreamed of finding gold. He panned for it, but luck bypassed him at the town when he was robbed of all he found. Misfortune struck him again when his wife died with the birth of his son. He moved to the sea to become a fisherman. But poverty became his modus operand. In his dreams he would wake; the cry of his son was still extant in his ears.