Implant

Treading on liquid and looking back over the lake

I know I got here but did I walk across or have I sank

To the bottom in a hallucinogenic haze

Puzzling a past in fragments of days

I know I lived them but were they all misplaced

Until now looking in a mirror’s reflection of time on a beach

Sand and the grit of all these broken teeth

Lost ago and replaced implants

False bights too insensitive to detect what might

Be artificial sweeteners and a fractured life

Out there on the water like ice cubes bobbing

Has the solar effect melted the footing?

Lying here broken and wondering

Was there ever there something she could not live without?

Or was I always an accruement to an appendage

Dangling like a bracelet, optional for wardrobe changes?

Was there a space built forever to place a foundation

Insider her caverns of her life’s manifestation

Of a future, a home, a reliable partner to share like a bone

Of her body without which she crumbles

An organic machine grown out instead of constructed

Yet I feel like a jettisoned mechanic’s component

Replaced from a box, pumping on pistons while my

Old self continues to rot, out here on this shoreline

Without knowing the plot.

Yet I know as I stare into the impending show

Of dust and past of grains gone in miniature cyclones of sounds

Waiting on the breeze that one day with my gray hair

And one day where you are not there, but buried deep

I know my tears will not halt to weep for a part of you breathes in me

Even if it’s a place I would rather seethe in anger, bubble out and expel the stranger

Folded up inside my being interlaced with all I’ve seen

My child, my wife, the broken wings of my life

Crippled in a corner, longing for a former shoulder

To cry upon in tandem to have my words have a landing

As if there was some pebble of compassion still left in you

Of hardened love, of elemental proof that one day at one time

You loved me some place outside of mine

So in retrospect I move in sloth

To scavenge the ground for that pebble that I pretend is lost

And as my feet get rooted into this shore, I must implore

It is just another grain of sand, gone slipping through a water gloved hand

Incapable to hold because it has never known a place in real life

Our balance was imbalanced from the beginning

One girl taking and one man giving

Appreciation mystified and where was I to bellow the smoke

And hope the waves of you would wash upon my face

Refresh my faith in all the days I felt taken for granted

For a stepping stone never demands his

Day on top, and so I thought I knew you, love excused you

And know it is melted and I have felt it, your dribbled soul

That there was never much to you when I step away