Are you here to parade in my past
Marching, lock, stock and barrel
With all the should’ve-been soldiers
Never healed
Never having entrusted their hand
Am I here to remain unredeemed
Writhing, uncertainty everywhere
With all the versions of me
Never arrived
Never knowing anything but alone
All I learned Today
Blood’s thicker than Truth
I unsettle You
If my thumb’s broken, it was not for Naught
Kids will find their Fun
Joy lives ‘longside Pain
Victims don’t live Here
Boundaries
Drawing them in bold, black ink and silvery stardust
Screaming-streamed across the age-old sky
Can do nothing to take back my life
Can it
Filters
Weaving them with silken strands and begging hands
Humbly offered across the communal table
Will do nothing to bring back the gentleman
Will it
How would the rodents speak
What words would they say
“Yes, you, bring berries to your back yard
And all manner of citrus and apples alike
Fresh, full with fructose, on these barren of days
We planned well for the season
The Winter in May of the Spring
Evidence our good-faith actions
Our holes in diligence dug
Where we find once again, our daily bread
While our feathered Southern friends, oh!
How they need, need, need your hand
We’ll let them dine
We promise”
I see the trajectory
By the time this is over
Your hands will scribble of your past in unrecognizable caricatures
Your ink will run dry
Only I’ll have the proof of you
And but for my forethought, but for my need
But for my suffering walk
It’s clear you’d have been a vapor
That might just as well be the moon, there at the end of these miles
You, sending out SOS love signals, hoping I’ll find your gaze
I, the Major of some spacecraft crashed light years away
Will all this only be an imagined adventure, two souls, starstruck
I wonder how I’d look with the Sun on my face. Not the fast and deep flowing sunlight, who I long ago named Hope. But the actual Sun. Surely the truth and green of my eyes would shine. Surely I’d see my chin lifted ever so slightly higher. Surely I’d feel beautiful. Then, “Hope,” I could say, “move along.”
Should any of self-proclaimed gods upon high
Be lying in wait for my feet to trip up
Be prowling as jackals for meat from my bones
Grow old you shall, ‘fore you find my will at play
Dementia and graves will be yours if you dare
Take me on for sport will you?
I cannot care
