Feathers and Lice

I am trying to forget, to unmerge wishes and reality

Saw a Facebook post of a guy’s girlfriend claiming her territory

Joking he’s taken as if want of such could ever be announced, Dare be it publicly

I cannot remember that feeling as a man

Not even the wedding day; it seems tainted after finding that letter

That and the obvious aftertaste, but the letter like a stamped passport of her regrets

Written so long ago it corrupts like tumors that were always present

Oh well that was what it was

The others well my head just doesn’t know

My heart felt it twice, once the day the Nightingale wore green eye shadow

Sat on my sofa and tried to not let me give up hope before she faded

The owl for about three seconds on a phone call when she asked

That is if you still want to; as if she wanted and I might not

For that splinter of time and then collapsing into the debate

If she was always so ready to let go, it’s all a bunch of feathers

Pittances of desert water compared to the clarity of a waterfall’s reflecting pool

Low expectations of detail into the self churning

Wanting a place to put the sensations of entitlement to care for another human being

Makes me feel everything I have to offer is a burden rather than a blessing

Pay them to tolerate rather than them reciprocate to me to enjoy;

Shouldn’t feel that, reeks of littleness and cancer

Don’t know the cure because I honestly do not know what the alternative feels like

I think I have seen it in others to others

Just makes the absence all the worse

Wanting an emotion one acknowledges he may never have

Makes a man feel like fungus

That death is death; just ends, no spirit, not God, not permanence, just nothing

Searching, questioning, meditating, turning inward to find the universe

Insular protection numbing the bended gazes of castle-wall women

With no soliciting signs and boiling oil dump-pots

The feathers stuck to my skin with the lice in the strips burrowing

Wanting the only image of love I have ever known

The eventual silence, the nonresponse like my pages are penned by an alien

Wanting to blast off, find home, get out of the definitions

To see hope like a star fly right to the perimeter and melt trying for the center

Knowing sometimes that is all a man can do