You betta recognize!
When you smile,
And when you bite your lip and sigh,
Your eyes searching for mine
Looking for some sign
That all the while
I have had you in my heart.
That’s when time
Rushes in like waves of the same moment,
Like I was on one of my old trips;
I press my finger to your lips:
I am yours, you are mine
And we know that’s at least a start.
I fought to keep it down at first,
Like promising never to drink again;
The it was second nature to laugh
And explain that I was too busy.
But like drinking, there’s the thirst,
And I find myself back at the pen
Raping paper again as I ply my craft
In this motherfucking southern city.
You don’t know what you’ve done
Wrecked the car by going too fast
And I along for the ride
Get the lash of blame
Because I pumped the gas.
Your shirt has come undone
These windows are steamed from the inside
Oh? What? This stupid game
That can’t survive the morning sun;
Now just memories from my past.
And as the tires start to slide
And as you search my fevered eyes
Bare shoulders spangled with drops of rain
Realizing that we’ve crashed
Because nothing stays the same.
It is cold in this basement
Cracks in the casement
Windows leak whatever warmth
To the suckling of the cold.
Share! Share creaks the air
Of that many mouthed night sky.
In a forest of bare breasted trees,
Their raiment mulching around their knees
Winds a path I build when I first got here
Now only walked by squirrels and deer
Within the house, but still below ground
Is that subtly comforting electronic sound
Of the magical cricket machine.
A winter white sheet covers me
As I sit in this chair, unmoving.
My breaths are shallow and I can’t see
Whether to move or stay very still:
I am hung on that decision
Like a meathook.
The longer I wait, the more my weight tears me
To get off is still more painful
But there is no mistaking impalement
On the pike of indecision.
What to do? I don’t know;
I will never know unless I do
Something – anything is better,
But to throw off these veils
Is to see what I am afraid of:
That lonely vista of sunrise
Over faraway mountains from another mountaintop.
No road nor path presents itself
In the gloaming beyond this sheet;
Light-shadows shiver and mold to each other
Unknown consequences and results
Which my feeble calculations
Cannot fathom as I am staked here.
Nobody knows who I am anymore,
But if anyone can it must be me.
Count on a breathless ride for part,
Meandering, enjoyable inner tubing for another,
And yet other unpredictable situations.
These are all definition-grounds,
To file and hone the self-blade
And the mind-sword.
Be born and becoming.
My freedom is a burden; I have no direction
Automaton, I am missing vital instructions.
I think I know just what I must do
But I cannot seem to pull myself through
This wasteland of broken mirror shards,
A painting I thought I had painted so hard
That the quality was enough to last a while
But I hear the click of the statistics turnstile.
I hear those close freed by this decision
An am thankful that they withheld their derision.
Sleep is coming in her own time.
Soon, but not right now.
I hear her footsteps in the courtyard
And smell her in the still air.
Sometimes my words fail me;
I can’t think, and my poetry sucks.
But keep trying, trying, trying
From my blanket-swaddled lair.
Preceded by gifts of yawns
Tearing up my eyes,
Filling them with dust and starlight
Beckoning to dreamlit vistas.
Fighting the unseen entity
Trying to tell myself that I don’t want to
Mind slagging into smooth film
And willpower saturates to crystals.
I am small again:
Smell of closets, scuttle of spider;
Withdrawing as the fat withers from my mind.
Rediscovering someone vaguely familiar
Only from the corners of my eyes
In old photographs
Or in passionately scribbled lines.
In this transition,
Is it supposed to endure
Or is it supposed to break?
Phoenix, do you hurt when you burn to ash
Or when you rise to the sun?
Questions that reflect
My bewildered state of mind
What side trip of hyperspace
Oh what fortunate dilemma of uncomfort.
Forced to remember, to recall
Those unanswered playthings
With the back mirror-pooled eyes
Of teddy bears and demanding kittens;
Of imagined characters that were once so real
That I was them,
And more than that, happy to be.
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