Helicopter seeds descending from tree houses
and
resting in ponds shadowed by shaken needles;
—I awoke from a dream this morning—
Forests in fiery oranges plagued by pine beetles
and
a man fishing in the dusk, a sole fish he arouses.
—such a dreamin' I had me—
How about them men in the mountains, hermit'd, high, isolated,
and
pensive with pens in ink, draftin' a'lookin' after their suicide notes:
—it was nonsensical, such nonsense—
I can feel my bones aching,
my finger bones aching.
Don't you apologize, fish, for biting bait
lest the others hear that I commiserate
amongst the fishes in the lake water:
"She could have a mother; she could be a daughter!"
I feel that boom; I know that boom:
That's Thunder's yellow rumble a'stumblin'
'cross the oak-wood floors of my room–
That's naked, **** clothes strip'd.
A pile and a bundle,
my bones are aching.
That's a candle left burning,
that's saints speaking in tongues,
that's men hung like curtains on rungs–
This world is getting old, times are a'turning.
That's a taxi cab afterlife, a mail-order wife,
that's pills on the floor of a Motel 6 in Reno,
that's forty-four hundred lost playing keno.
We can't always be lucky, who calls that a life?
My joints are a'sprainin' aching
with the preempt of a storm.
That's writer's block and cramped hands, cramped hearts,
that's a hovel heated by an oven, heads found in hot ovens,
that's the hillside and the glens past where the track bends but
just before the dens of monsters that I swear I left behind that night.
—dreamin' a'dazin' and days in always let my demons out—
That night I hid another razor in the rafters thinking,
"My thoughts I'll bury."
I ran away to sell maps of the human heart en Algérie.
