The dark sour-mash smell of leather
hovers in the sweat-stained heat
As the truck snarls, awakened
its tires in their Sisyphean tread
find the familiar road around the lake
The rounding concentric lines of regret
I trace like an addled palmist.
When you spend so much time lost
you find comfort in the surety of banal paths.
I am an adult
But I never left the womb of this town,
wrinkled offspring of a tired mother
Who carries me in a low-slung belly
Drying and stretching in endless vessel.
She knows I tried to leave her once
Across the world
In another womb, green and fecund and full of death
and like the lukewarm believer I am,
I was spat out
crawled back to her.
She swallows me back up
Like the drowning boy in the lake
***** in water.
If only the weight in my mouth
Could float in water, like the styrofoam buoys
Could float to the top, in a dead man’s float
but it’s all too well-moored, concrete and clay.
I am silent
I am silent
Cruel mother,
You know I will never
Have the courage
To leave.