Story Time for Thirty-Nine

Story Time for Thirty-Nine

I do not know how to tell my life’s story

Without taint of despair, drama, and stares

At all these road side asphyxiations, mosquito scars

Bloodied gums and spat out teeth scraped up from concrete

Lost in the lawn blades like lambs for the slaughter

Sounds crippled and maimed and jumbled into the same

Resigned stoic implant grin of pensive reflection of all that is left in

Is garbage pungent with self-destruction

Of a pain that I find in no way honorable or comparable

To the great war stories of human tragedy, more like a footnote

To a news feed on a random Monday media cycle to be glanced

Sipped, not savored for its sentient body of flavor

Mud slogged toes and ankles parched for parole

From these Sisyphus-style endeavors

I made and make my choice and in that I pray for a foreign voice

To find compensation in the duration of this camped up isolation

The mirage of my happiest moment all lost and incapable of remembrance

Without taint of the sentences carried out in blood drawn

Days beaten and what is there left in the keep, but a man arguing with himself

Alone in his sleep for a black out curtain and shudder speed prolonged

An aperture blanketed with some alien form of speech

To shut out these visions, to throw a comforter on this world

Like a shadow dome reality that could lighten this load from crushing

The paragraphs they keep coming reminding that all of the timing

Of these choices on love, on placating loneliness with the faith in her was enough

To slay my sanctuary and run back to that lovely step of alone

The gospel of none, praying for answers and believing in one

Man to stand here and take these sounds resides in my head

In this garden of vines overgrown waiting for Medusa’s stare

The peace of stone living out these twelve years, acting as if I want any change

In here, so weak, so feeble and incomplete, wanting for energy for drink for the plenty

Believing in nothing, wanting not to move, maybe it is better to wallow in this tomb

The solace of over exaggerating the doom of being abused

At least this bitterness is like a closet quilt friend, soft and familiar

And purple stitched to my skin, I can pretend, I have the smallest of answers

Buried in this solace like a totem for Thomas to squelch the fires of this doubting

And rise up in the columns of this realism mounting

I just wanted to reach our for a hand and not have to, but get to explain

And not have the names call out feel like Narcissus looking into those waters 

Obsessing over my own problems like golden child toys

Never relinquished for an attic or door to let them walk away

So growth for more was possible in the letting go of pains for a transient semblance

Of justice vagabond on a road strangled and mangled and never made it quite here

Those words of peace to appear like a hasenpfeffer meat from the haberdasher

To the butcher’s blade I could eat that feast and drink her milkshake

And garnish all the stolen wealth for my own sake and sip like a king

Over this emotional high ground estate I had built for myself in these

Self-centered fantasies of what I had earned in the misfortune accumulated

Let it go, let it go, let it pass, let it be for in the quest I have lost the grandest parts of me

Scattered like cogs in a watch to keep time for what was dropped in the fury

Flailed in the fervor, shocked out the stature that these seconds and minutes and hours

Have not been tracked or kept, but spat out and bent under foot and trod

All for the sod grown in this other abode full of wonder and color

And potential, but sot with the inebriated façade of hurt like a shirt

To wear with every exertion of coercion to participate in this prolonged war

The pain of seeing these sights and not owning them for now

And not for what was once alive before