Somewhere along the line
it feels like I lost my poetry.

But I've always had a deep affinity of childhood curious-gaze with the light of a passing car slicing through a slumped drapery in the dead of a powerless October night
like a fumbling mouse with night-vision, glassy eyed, walk, walk, walk
run, run, run
scurry-rubber like an imperial humvee of red-carpet glamor.

Somewhere along the line
the freeze of a less-than-bourgeoise temperature never felt close to Antarctic
until the ring of a cell-phone became my national anthem
and the complacent all-eternity-and-everything-we-are-and-more reflective one-eye of a laptop became my national flag
I waived it with surrender calling to all nation states that 'I don't give a sweet ****,
entertain me.'

watching politics like sports and sports like politics I couldn't help but hear the old Native inside of me scream in suffocated final breaths so I turned up the volume to drown him out
and when I wished to return to his comforting embrace, I found he had drown to death
so all I could do was stand over his wading body in the river of my mind and lax my shoulders in defeat.

I rang the midnight church bell of 'send new message' to tell the world that didn't care
the shaman is dead.

all they said was
'finally, the shaman is dead.'
I nodded, laughed, locked the bathroom door
and cried until the river ran dry
the shamans body so far down creek I could pretend to forget he had ever existed

the ache inside became a masked anonymity with the glare of Dorian Gray
I shrugged and said, 'I could never make time anyways'
and fell right back into my sleepy routine with another cup of coffee.