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Barton D Smock Nov 2016
the story of her brother’s drowning
her father’s
haunted
toolbelt

told
separately

to the arsonist
who

while pulling
her by
the leg
from the house
of her sister
the fasting
mudwrestler

said

dig, you

tunnels
torch
the dark
I am digging through the zietgeist
for complicated meaning
and answers to questions
I've been sorely needing
but finding my pop culture
references are all aging
and the rest of my peers
are through staging.
The construction has long begun.
They've moved toward purpose
and still standing on this lonely
hill I find: I'm the only one.
I put my dreams and hobbies away.
I became a toolbelt
a punch card, a rope begun to fray.
I think I thought I'd be him again.
That man I so briefly was
at the lip of the wolf's den.
But I don't know how to mend
I don't know that man well enough
to even know start from end.
Gone at the turn and kept in
place still running until I've become something with which it's easy to reckon.
Where's that **** and vinegar gone?
The blood between your teeth?
The last fading embers of your dawn?
No one gets to do it again, my friend.
It only goes around once.
To each one start and one end.
I'm getting sick and tired of painful truth.
Give me pleasent fiction to enjoy.
I'm short on time and long in the tooth.

— The End —