Thicket Imprisonment?
The impossibility of knowing the structure of these chains preclude
And simultaneously absolve me of the responsibility for hope.
As if visualizing the prison term that this culminated trial represents
Staggers me into a stasis of self argument between anger, depression
And helpless apathetic complacent acceptance to live here uninterrupted.
I can wallow in this routine in a comfort zone of loneliness like a white-fur overcoat
Continued to be worn long into summer bearing stares and puzzled views
From transient onlookers acknowledged only in theory as I pace out the count of
What may as well be a remainder of a life-sentence.
That all I will ever live and die in is this beige-painted palace turned single-story
Domicile baffles and yet clubs me into the realization that I have jettisoned the
Duality of hope of wanting or believing in better-than and that is numbing to an infinite degree
Bearing down like a forty-mile-wide hurricane in a blanket nadir at mid-day bellowing.
And I sit on a curbside silent accepting the inevitable like a medicine dose for an interminable disease. A cancer patient riddled and fraught with web-works of a body turning on itself
Narrow of advice or the ability to listen to it even if offered. I am a pariah amongst my own dreams. A leaper messiah to my own faith, dumbfounded and inching towards stirring a stick in this dust to manufacture the symbol of infinity for infinity like a race track with no spectators and a single vehicle with an oil-depleted engine.
I feel like what I have to offer is like rancid meat billowing maggots awash in a bacteria hell that no amount of detergent or Merlin-concocted wizardry could amend the infection that has set in
Based on the consequence of my own choices, Maybe there is someone swimming in waters near or far wanting of this assortment and yet I feel flaccid and limp at the movement of inching this body towards just cliffs for the peril of knowing the hype of falling in love
I see the structure of this mechanism rationalize its departure yet slipping in from the back door is the reality that in the end, who I am is entirely unlovable independent of this convenient excuse cardboard cut-outs of logistics. I am spoiled and selfish, a hermit recluse spider without an awareness of what it takes to interact in this circus menagerie and I must crawfish back into my mud-hole.
I am cracking and I am stacking like papers in a drawer of who I use to be and was complicit in the belief that my life is done living and why and why would any of it matter. I am afraid of asking for assistance as if I must help myself and it is easier to play pretend parlor tricks for my own amusement as if I could possibly understand any of this on a level beyond rudimentary.
The concept of making friends ends after high school and even there, was done accidently. I walk alone it is the only road I have ever known and I should feel lucky to have what I have and not complain and the glories of psychological treatment amount to the same stance with a numb rearrangement of serotonin and dopamine, yet not a change in between the means of how I go to sleep. (Repeat the mantra, “It could always be worse.”)
False faiths and hopes rearranged the truth is I do not know if I even loved the crab queen to begin with. What if it was just a plea to remain not alone? What if I feel like the ultimate poetic fraud to write and write and write of love, yet know not of any of it because concern is not love, love is a reciprocating wave and I have never felt it’s crest and I am a Charlatan exposing views on what feelings are and what the nature of faith and hope and love combine into and how they amend these lives with bandages and crutches and wonders and yet none of it has ever been real. I can not say for certain about any of it even its granular formation. I am infinitely wrong in all directions of this demagnetized compass.
Mocking me on a trail to desolation expounding in a whirlybird arrow spinning out of control
Like a jester head laughing in purple and green hues that this device makes as much sense as the hatter to Alice, a guide only in the loosest sense of the profession.
Evaluating and over-thinking like an obsessive-compulsive-disorder pent on the ritualizing of the only tangible mechanism in this universe, my mind’s ability to sort itself out in this fray. There is no counterpart, no bowl of hands to lay these thoughts into, no sounding-board like a prayer to commit this spirit unto or these worries or fears or insecurities or fragilities or joys or temptations or peace. There is none and what appeared to be was strictly a fallacy, a ploy and a ruse to bide time for an excuse to move on at a time of greater convenience.
In retrospect I ponder the validity of any moment and like a middle-aged polar bear feel global warming encompassing me and the sheets of the ice dissipating in a rapid shrink from all directions. My paws are slipping and I am left drinking this brine, heavy on the brink of extinction foaming like a Kraken to consume me and the blubber of my own misguided faiths.
I remember that brick porch step pondering that car door and that St. Charles trek knowing I should have left and what that meant a woman incapable of coming out and saying what she wanted out of selfishness and I was in turn too selfish to be alone, to admit defeat, to acknowledge that I had a standard level of minimum treatment to continue the placement of me into the life of another, as if I had value, as if I was in some way not a burden, a negative appendage granting gifts or purpose or worth, hopeless and certain that this was some how my one shot at any sort of connected future, that there could be no other avenue.
Seeing so many streets under construction or homes out of my price range, beautiful in their wood and stucco and Victorian arches and marble veins and oak flooring I am a shanty town cardboard mush slat in this Louisiana
Truncated choice like a barter of never ever being the voice of ultimatum of what tasks were necessary to fulfill the requirements of my continued presence. Stake a claim to your love dear lady for if not this carriage will ride. And I scoff at my own lunacy to believe that knowing I had not the faith in my self to ask her love to fight for me and with that my self-worth lies limp on a sofa like a punctured birthday balloon knowing in the end that request was made and shot into smithereens.
All these years of lumber in mouths, of Buzz and Batman belts, of Jenny and a movie theater retainer, of Maria and biology notes and mind maps of Regina and dark green dresses, of interminable freshman to junior years packed into infinite bland green wave helplessness, to the Crab Queen and transposed tax classes, monogrammed mustard sticky notes and howls at a dragon’s den, spider man spinning and a pathway in, All my eggs in the French market basket of that feeling crackling splat
On a half a million dollar wooden porch with a fifty-cent beer, a green table that was never mine, a pepper-leaf fan and a noise too loud for my no-longer neighbors. Mirage and no this all had to go. The extinction clock expiring, the compass spun, the polar bear is boiling and the December snow has come. Faith like a mace shattered and a vampire staked clump all these names in a casket and begin a new life, and yet halt there is a fawn exiting the forest.
Spotted and dainty and hungry, the procreated remainder substantiating that this course of events did in fact transpire, a constant reminder like a nail gunned in yellow sticky note sharing her name to the billboard of my forehead to view in the mirror at each mornings bolted door shave that: You must be here.
Here in this wonderland of hick gawks and yokels of wood-paneled offices and 1980’s dairy festival décor, there the fawn plants in like an anchor to all the mandatory’s, the cassette replays of side A and side B, lather rinse repeats of days like hammer hits pounding the same pneumatically-inserted nail, as if even the most minute relief of compression awakening the potential for its release must be eliminated by the structure of each days fruition. Sentencing out this dichotomy of work release of ankle bracelet Thursdays and Fridays to know I go, but only so far, to be tethered to Tangipahoa like a ball-chain gag-order to seesaw love of a child with the hatred of a crab queen.
Wanting in part to destroy every semblance of choice as I feel mine has been stolen; as a falsely accused man bleeding out this prison sentence for at least a dozen more years, knowing the confliction of committing more and more to this wasteland or painting a fresh complexion on the horizon to make it my own, but the background the use of the base colors have all been chosen for me and I know that I could not change them if I wanted to, and the teeth of this matter rest like the jaws of a pit bull entrenched in my thigh that in truth this is all my choice.
I chose the crustacean to inject my faith in as a bond like a forever stamp and I chose poorly so whatever complaint I have now is like a Willy-Wonka culminating realization null and void contract made in infinitesimally tiny print agreed to under the auspices of the Catholic Church, the state of Louisiana, and my own penis which under court-rendered decree are civilly-voided yet the repercussions under the boundaries of humanity still apply quite functionally under the wide eyes of the offspring between us that however duped I may have been into agreeing to such pacts I did pledge my seal in doing so and thus immolate my own will for her Will.
And her bald-baron slunk like a miscounted crow in their murder plotting on phone wires and political compatriots to manifest the suicide of a marriage, of that buck in headlights starring at a Ford Expedition double shot gun barreling down as he stepped out from this forest into that winter clearing. To take a moment for himself, the snowballs the trees heavy and over-burdened and work days telling, the fawn and the buck out there in the pasture alone building snow men and flicking clumps like prayers in the power outage, seven changes of clothes, a drenching upon each exit and in the end unanswered phone calls and poker-faced gratitude for letting the crab go to work today despite her braggadocio at dawn.
And a weekend for Gertrude and Claudius to plot and my ignorance to Memphis
In the wake of this bloodshed my butterfly Ophelia has flown. Seeing the stench of this death and parades like a ghost over my hopes that the scent of this crimson wash will ever be purged, Such distance in our meeting, two years like slate-steps and yet this poisoned sword still rots in me and Yorick’s skull laughs at my myopic vision. I must heal and find convalescence from this theatrical outpouring in the atonement of allocated free will.
Choices at times that in retrospective grandeur allow for the clemency of the court and the exculpation of a man if only in self and anger to dust, forgiveness like an elixir squeezed out in an epoxy to fill in the cracks of abandoned thirsts for justice across the busted mouth of Hamlet with his eyes to heaven crying out for God’s remembrance in his times of trouble. The greed of retribution blanketed with the solace of peaceful reverence chosen like a father’s ghost, a compatriot for these nights whispering in what his son really needs to hear.
I see you God in my mirror, un-nailing that canary Judas note facing me with the faith in what is. The drama of that red pool has not killed me. I am not rancid. I am not a being of anthrax or hemlock. I am vaccinated from crab viruses. I am crustacean immune. The murder on the wire can hem and guffaw, can sit in the first pew with the fawn and ride bicycles to pray, can share in this communion with tainted lips and I will find my own wings.
My Ophelia may fly, she may dance in a Houston
I am whole. I am hungry and my Ophelia says I need to start doing and quit thinking and focus on what I want to do in this world beyond that of this Denmark, this pine island purgatory, this mortgage reduction and allow myself the space to want things I can not have and hope for them, to create avenues for aptitudes I do not yet possess, to see New York or California, the boundaries of this land, to see these monetary deposits in realistic fruition across months knowing the positive nature of progressing possibilities.
To see these electronic doors opening, to see curtains closing on my choosing and the sun stemming in upon my discretion, to see dirt like fill in a yard for a garden and a puppy dog I have the companionship to provide, that I am not a vagabond life proliferating. I can want and want and want and yet in ceasing to want I will be satiated. This equation is inevitable. I have to want this internal eternal and infinite to promulgate my own podium for the laws of my own kingdom.
I am tall. I am poetic. I am humble and magnetic. I am my own compass held in heart strings reverberating with the thunder of a river pilot paddle boat. I may not be magnanimous. I may not be destined for oceans or intercontinental travel, but I can move and self-direct this excursion across these waters. The steam of this engine burns hotter than the hell I have fought and her or not be damned. I have me. I have God. I have my fawn. I have the duty of this ship to maintain, to keep clean this decking and parade under moon and sun rays. I have Saints on Sundays. I have magic in hundreds of spells waiting to be cast to cleanse this meat and breathe in this breeze.
I have absence in a pallet of possibility for a best friend, a lover, a companion to this journey and yet in this space I will always have me and me must be and is enough to satiate this hunger. To starve so forcefully is to jettison this feast of self granted by either God or scientific computations for an anthill of pity and gorge on these insolent thoraxes and legs churning with fervor to pinch with rigged jaws into the nourishment of my own skin. In this individual commiseration I use only the worst parts of me to eat away my self and progress upon a path of diminution.
I see the impotency of self pity to reach positive outcomes, which in the reflection of others actually fosters virulent results. No one wants to straddle charity for longer than a drive by. Tragedy clung-to is an anchor that handcuffs and engulfs would be Samaritans like a Hawking black hole consuming and the radiation that comes out is in every way toxic even if not identical, it is still perilous. I refuse to be that black hole and suck in the life, the beauty that I pray for. It is not the genesis of the universe to which I commend my spirit.
The nexus of God may invite me in silence and I respond in full surround sound with the accompaniment of my own orchestra. I may have a Trent Reznor born again atheistic reversal. I may never extinguish all these doubts like the fires on Sambor, but I have rebuilt that which constitutes me. I may forget. I may see reflections in that mirror like damning blades to a throat hesitant to expand on that razor’s edge, but I will breathe and be closer to God and every path that I choose to move forward upon. Fear be dammed.
I will look at this fawn’s gentle face, her body in size six expanding this winter’s frost and I will never resent her. I will cherish her and protect her from this hunt. I will eschew the fallacy that the hunter came. I know the doe wandered off by choice and Bambi and I will flourish. I see no need to urinate on old territories, to scrape these trunks. These saplings are fine and they will grow and my fawn will see two meadows and two divergent groves and she will know the nature of love. Guilt be dammed.
Suicide like an alibi, crutch of a girl reasons abounding to continue and her alone may have been the only window to see back then that this can not be the end, the gall the arrogance of a maternal call, still alive and I walk alone face the stall, script these sheets, resign this time, but not this life, Forsook the desert and squelch the spite, shot 31 times and still I march on, broken heart with a bullet proof vest in a Bible. Quit be dammed.
And this the background and not the foreground of my seasons, I will dart and I will dash and I stand firm in the traffic of these lanes again and again and again, for I am not afraid of becoming back-strap. The thicket is thorny and cumbersome and the bastion of the destitute. I am not that man. I am a rack of antlers forty miles wide imposing my thrust upon this world in this spot to claim my own and I need not permission to stand in full. Imprisonment be damned.
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