Acacia

Run, run, and all the sum of these days piling up on my shoulders

Like the phantom image of you hunched over invisible but heavy

On my back like a caravan of regret and pent up mess of your legs

Entangled over my torso and asphyxiating my neck with a sadistic faceless glee

That you could stay with me despite my shakes and stutters to break the lines

Of where you and I entwined into one another as a one-of marching onward

Carrying and kicking sand frenetic to discard your dead-fish hands

Flapping against my cheeks as your skull knocks my ear lobe with nefarious placid energy glued on like a bullet lodged from time-bombed shrapnel clogged

Up in my bloodstream segregating the momentum of a completed circuit

Off I go and how I know I won’t ever get to go inside a tomb of us to exhume the

Rooted crux of why you anesthetized the body of our marriage left your half pale

And flaccid with my legs bowing out from the weight wanting me to crash it

Like a Hindenburg still deflating from where I thought you were leaving me with

A parasitic memory of a shell to contain your guilt like a moment of duplicity

And off the acacia flies exoskeleton into her southern night,

Antebellum porch retrained sipping her elixir’s deranged, she escaped this weight

Like fluttering wings and sent a solo explanation to hum the duet of a violin sting

In tune with the hum on a Louisiana summer night

From a cypress tree she was finally free

But memories are spectral and shift upon the breeze as I sped these steps to shed

The sentiment off like a crust of sawdust pulverized in time the bones of you

Remain inside your own body up on that porch stoic inside the part,

You’d rather forget, but calcify in time and broken in nine

The marrow infested with a hollow joy that an ersatz escape could not find