Sunday, September 6, 2015

20150906 Backbone

Some nights the bones of your back crawl out
Like a malcontent centipede of vertebrae tickling the Titanic
To evacuate the subway train of chugging subterranean
The beast is hungry for a vertical spine and all this supine positioning

Belly to the sun bulging in a U button to the sky god
Daring the bastard to “Just do it.  Take me you fucking sadist!”
Makes the standard bearer of the body a refugee
The bony shrapnel taken for years mushy clogged in disks

Is embarrassed that the eye shadow of a photograph could make the mind
Fret about appearances as if all this dancing was not an illusion
The straddle-step “Where do we go from here?”
The whetted tongue to dare ask for a drop of water in this lake of sand

The gall to scald this skin in the rays of a friend’s death to camouflage a busted heart
To conjure sympathy to swallow the eviction with want rather than resentment
A spine can only take so much before the jellyfish coagulants bubble out the blood stream
Seep through the dermis into the eyeballs and melt the façade into a pathetic lump

Writing and wanting or expecting or hoping or dwelling or recreating reality
To just get by, to tread water for a phantasmal shoreline in owl feathers and redwoods
Harboring a siren that is indifferent but willing to devour a carcass if given the opportunity
This spine will have none of that, slipping ship before landfall

The postmark and send signal and sonar without the chiropractic play-toy
No, there is no kindness there, only scary as was told and ignored
For such fallacies of hope and dreams and turtle foolishly stretching neck
The world slumbers and wakes sot in amnesia to forget the raw ache of love

Hear not the siren song for she was never singing, only the crash of rocks
Fishing for foolish invertebrates too slow to evolve in tidal pools
Swishing the origin of all life: the strive to connect, to be seen in form
To witness and be witnessed

Close your eyes my son for there is no one up or over there to see you
Only the echoes of blackened shadows    



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