Balsam Hill

Balsam Hill

Switch-flipped and grip-slipped, external ends quick

To say today you are no longer entitled to hold custody of your own feelings

Like contraband for a flight to a foreign country unplanned and immediately mandatory

No baggage packed, no passport to legislate a potential return

Boarding in haste, in haze, solitary and muddled in a huddle of one

Scuttled out on the runway in a prop plane with no pilot’s license

Envisioning the inevitable splash down or crash now into oncoming interstate traffic

With a circus of onlookers at this man awash in red and swollen lips

Bartering for clemency in the wake of all this destruction abounding

Children screaming in the background, sirens wailing about timely dispatching

With clunks and thuds and limbs mangled against steel smeared on asphalt

And I did not ask for a God-damn bit of this

I was just holding this feeling, this love, like a license to operate the vehicle

Of a simple life building snowmen and pancake animals,

Hanging Christmas tree ornaments on Balsam Hill plastic limbs

Abiding to three-hundred day a year attic storage

Duped with contraband no one else can seem to understand,

But assumes I must have and produced this upon myself with just cause

Like a well trained Labrador running into oncoming traffic

Indemnify the feminine for the condemnation of the masculine cliché

Applies easier like a Johnson and Johnson household cleaner

Wipe away without streaks in a law firm that now speaks

For her like a soapbox calling the shots

In mailed to letters to a house built together, but she has walked out on

The fourteen-foot Christmas tree stands in the foyer like a redwood

Decorating with every memory of decades to now, pondering the moment

Of how two put it up and now one day in season’s time I will take it down

Solo in a manipulation of ladders and stair case over hangs, what does it matter if I fall?

Stuffing it sideways back up into an attic, knowing I will not be the one

To retrieve it next year, so I box it in inconvenient locations unlabeled

Knowing some other replacement me in the back of this coup will be questing these out

Constructing in tandem, so I better take the ornaments worth keep-saking now

Like the laminated construction paper outline of my daughter’s preschool hand

At least I can hold onto that, but I don’t know about any of the people in

The ones with photographs