There is a crimpled
fold page in me
Continents and
stratospheres are written
Meadows,
cumulonimbus, nebula, and punched tickets
Tire skids, stair
railings, bird girl feathers, and milk teeth
There was this magic
act my parents performed
They were nipple
young Catholic wanting to fornicate and so married
It snowed on their
wedding February ninth over forty years ago
It snowed the week
my first marriage ended on Thursday December eleventh
Louisiana bayou moss
and I am two generations descended from swamp people
The kind that hunt
in marsh and float logs in spring floods
Sugarcane and one
room houses with no conditioned air, humid take-it folk
A manner of heritage
and staying course, a stubbornness to godly love
The universal
rubble-shake of a human chest cavity
The maraca nature of
attempting contact
Garbled gravel and
thick slimy blood spittle
No specials in the
reduced for quick sale salvage bin
All there at some
interval of haircuts, follicles and hue tints
Electric shears and
curling irons modeling decency
Conversations on the
foot press chair
Swept floor hair and
tip to the stylist to make-believe the mirror
This box machine
used to work differently
I wrote letters and
poems, talked in sectionals with blemished hope
I knew the
ultraviolence, risks, and diving boards of delve waters
I took shrapnel and
kept marching, stared suns and licked fire
I loved like a
kamikaze madman ready to eat the orbed apple
Poison or sugar or
orchard or watch cogs uncoiling exasperated
I could write a
fight; I could warrior for love with slashed lips and shred knuckles
I would swallow
ghost peppers at dawn and Anjeo tequila at dusk
Seen and unseen god;
seen and unseen portals of the universe
Whisper me into a
shaken syrup distilled and languid
Questioning what any
of this is; if this machine inside is still operable
Testing the
transmission the smoke-kick zombie glaze of presence
To be present again;
to feel more than the body on a hospital bed
Wrist bracelet
oscillating in auditory awareness of a ghostly voice
Computing real and
dead, hard and soft, trying to be soft, pliable
Stigmatized vision
wondering if the retinas were ever capable of seeing some truth
No comments:
Post a Comment