Perpendicular Horizon

Sometimes I just want to fall over and cry

Weep at the moon in a lawn, quiet, no howls

Just scrape the carcass floating around in my lungs

As I breathed in our time together

I remember words floating there of what we were

The moment I realized you had lit them afire

Like a string-fuse of cinders sparking whizzing death

Forming a line of charcoal mosquitoes assembling coffins in my bronchi

Floating barges of memories through my blood stream

In a current of scorched flotsam

The packages, photographs, plates, architectural plans

Drift

Occasionally the parade comes back around

Years, hours, smells, sounds, time is shrapnel

Lodged like a hotel I cannot check out of

I am out of currency;

I do not want that; I do not want this

I do not want an alternative; oblivion sings

So I am attempting to live without living

I have crawled as much as I can inside my mind

Work, bills, invoices still come, but

Nothing feels appropriate; it is as if you killed me in that moment

Like that stupid fucking M Night Shamalamdingdong Sixth sense movie

Everybody raved about it and I saw it and just assumed the motherfucker was dead

I sat through that shit on the sofa with you, and yet this surprised me

I never pictured you could twist the blade, yeah I could see you killing me

But you wanted to plead to the authorities it was self-defense

Monster in my skin and to our child and all I did was love you

All I did was love you;

We built a country cathedral,

I ate your mother’s shepherd’s pie 

Nine years in that black and white and the whole thing was burned to flecks

And sometimes I just want to fall over and cry

Weep at the moon in a lawn, quiet, no howls

Just scrape the carcass floating around in my lungs

As I breathed in our time together

For so long I wanted to save you; a window to allow us to speak

I could forgive you verbally as if that was something you wanted

Knowing the schism was a void tearing away two entire people

The we who were ceased to exist entirely

I want to feel anger; I want to feel loneliness; I want to feel love

All are gone, vacuumed with the prior man, this is a character

In a body writing about politics, the universe, humanity

As an alien observer on outpost biding my time to even form an emotion

The basic components weigh like boulders

Rolling on an incline crushing my limbs each attempt

At least Sisyphus got to the top before he was forced to repeat

This is stationary numb

For years since the deluge the battles have approached in marauding nuance

Weekday-like innocuous and jarring like a stab wound to the abdomen

Instinct draws one to defend the face or the groin, but disembowelment

Is theater for a town and a man to replay in loop

As there is no glorified reprieve of jugular purge to gush forgetfulness’ embrace

There is the drive-through recollection of Wednesday’s laying left face flush to the hardwood

Staring at the underbelly of the sofa’s defying gravity like mountain climbers

Perpendicular to the Earth as the floor appears to rush into the sky and descend

Outside the raised porch boasts a white railing and an inverted horizon of grass

With the fence so the neighbors cannot peek in; I can see the dust floating, glistening

Like an audience as my tears trail west across the middle passage of my nose to the floor

Of what we called our home; staring at the complex, gravity has abandoned me

All I see is silence; I twist my spine and rise to peer at the pictures I had to take down

From the hallway to the mattress I still sleep in on the right side like always because

The bathroom path was on the left; even though the current place had a similar layout

I still cannot sleep in the middle or transpose 
 

That my dreams and waking thoughts are in a boxing match

Victory is exhaustion so that I forget the other and remember the victor.

I write to negotiate the peace of oblivion of pacific function

Financial so financial, bank account is like a cutout at a shooting range; riddled

The half tuition checks, the single election for health insurance; knowing full well

The greatest threat to me are my own hands; denial of coverage for therapy

Was a banner day for my faith.

The prenatal vitamins, the replacement closet menagerie I saw on the credit card statement without word

Before the trial, the subpoenas of kindergarten teachers, conspiring with the haughty

Getting me booted off my client at work was a spectacular coup

Image effusive with country glamor and mine a stray pup bowing out of cow-town

Knowing I had to give away every hour I went to war for to see our child

In order to continue respiration past thirty-five

The weight, the stakes in the yard to sell homes; if one can call them that

Battling with you over settlements still in the silence that can only be bought with lawyers

I think that is why they cost so god-dam fucking much

So that emotions can be scoffed at, batted down as inappropriate rebellion

To the austere sophistication of playbook divorce like a dance competition

Lauded over based on appearance rather than substance, subjective except for the sequins

I guess I never acquired enough; no one apparently can have enough sequins

You can apply them to bed sheets, energy bills, wall paint, jeans, and football jerseys

For season tickets we bought and I had to go every game alone,

Because priorities for you and to see come playoff time two years after the riots

You glistening there in your Drew Brees number 9 on that porch boasting about how you got tickets

Wore it to work standing on that porch like nothing had ever happened, new husband watching

In the mudroom as I come to pick up our daughter in my ritual of ignominy

I have never been a man of violence, but in that image in my mind I smash it to splinters

Yet it rebuilds itself perfectly as forgetfulness is an illusion

What humans really do is cover up memories in our brains like haystacks

We often believe pyres can be made, but the sticks remain dancing in eloquent

Lessons unfolding

Like the way when I finally got out the rental, bought a new house to make a go

In cow-town with the folks and the train tracks blaring

I put up my art, hung pictures of poetry, jazz, New Orleans, her, but not you

Grass to cut and gumbo to roux, Saints games to watch, aftercare pick up

True single-parent life, responsible from laundry, lunch packing, conversations, bedtime stories,

Scrapes and Scooby Doo and so many tiny talks inching their way from ignorance

Outgrown little pink socks watching white carpet grow beige knowing there was only death here

Packs of cardboard using china as everyday plates, who gives a fuck if they break

Downloading every genre of music in playlists just to have company

The illusion of someone talking to me without degrees or mandates but tickling freedom

From Miles Davis, Fats Domino, Sam Cooke Woody Guthrie, to Dylan, to Springsteen

The online pantomime digital life in ones and zeroes parading

Relishing the anesthetized environment where I can speak, but not have to conduct

The sign-up list to make an appointment to be heard

I would rather read Freud and learn how to psychoanalyze myself  

True human contact was always a puzzle, even before you

All you did was make the mud harden, cake on mixed with your spit

So that I feel it better some days to stay in the ground

Peering up, cool as if I can be in an egg shell with my electronic books, laptop

To read, to write, to think and bask in transcending universal

So that the personal of all the haystacks washes away in the superego’s grand insulation

The distance aids the throb to dull because the swell tends to intensify

When I look into our daughter’s eyes

Not sure if it was you or me that murdered her father

Blame is irrelevant, but blood, heart, lungs, abdomen all in a mashed unction

I attempt to imbibe slurp like a smoothie of strawberries

Seeing the red, pretending  

So now I am living in a bedroom with my grandmother five years later

On a forty-year old mattress with a spotty hotspot internet connection

To video chat with our daughter once every two weeks, waiting for our weekends

Trying to read her portions of chapters of Harry Potter feeling her thirst

Knowing I cannot buy a stable DSL line here

My one skillet is kept in the pantry with a pittance of my spices

For the times I can make room to peel shrimp and deveining the crustaceans

Is my meditation staring out the window over my grandmother’s sink

Out into the grass with the sky above and the dirt below

Ears less confused, but that mushy black line above the tail meat

Is being carved out before the heat is applied, natural from the Gulf

Genesis of Sundays sometimes using granny’s cast iron skillet

Taking time waiting for the last house to sell to buy someplace

Like a new lottery ticket for normality