Neck turns the head but don’t get the hair twisted. A crooked eye turns the sky upside down. Come forward with your certainty and let me tame you for you are wild in your clarity and I am life. Not given. Not taken. Make your presence an acquaintance of mine and I might lengthen your days of youth and ignorance. Or swerve contact with my eyes and watch me wither you to frailty like men who have learned too much death and bowed reluctantly to their successors.
Missed it. Trash. The slight of hand was deliberate but not intentional. The intent was the reach of my questions. I searched the hand because I thought it once held the heart. I might have been wrong. Beauty and trash have much in common when you see through them.
Day one.
They would say it was just another day. Or you might look at eachother and ask of eachother things you never asked eachother…before…you never knew eachother….still you question their commitment and yours. Its not that you’ve ceased to care. The fruit still has flavour. Maybe not as ripe as it once was. You never liked to eat the core. But thats where you must go. Hard. The fruit is softening. The heart is hardening. You do not notice what is happening around the centre of your world.
Bite me.
Fated to believe that it really does count. That numbers add up. The crosses and knives cut deeper than words and silence. Knowing that the count starts before you, runs ahead of aspiration, and the novelistic length of your thoughts. That desire carries you as far as you let it linger. A kiss inverted. You swallow your own lies. But they taste good.
Six thirty. You were on time. This time. You were here. I was on my way. Missed the train. Missed the boat too. Burnt the bridge behind the rush hour. Always Knew I could fly. Just needed you to believe. I could fly across the world between your heart and I. On my bicycle. Travelling you has been my greatest journey. So far. So far away. Too high to climb your thoughts. I tried you like you were written by Hemmingway. You were sentences that served me time in the cave of loneliness. I fell down in battle. We grow up in love and loss. Played the hand too hard. Not soon enough. Only time wins it all. Its seven.
Was it fundamental to die before we ever got to learn about who we were? Our second birth gave us skin. We await our humanity on the third go round. The unreturned, who never knew sleep didn’t discern the need to play on the hallow ground or ween on the blood of sacrifice.
Basil chases the child who runs into walls. Transparent heart is planted in a climate of hate. Lucent as the dark covering, lashes closed the eyes they never used. See through your sounds, the blind mouth utters crimes of thought, a berry too sweet to swallow all at once.
Drown deep slowly. You are continents of water. Drown long and timeless. You are bodies of murder. Drown soft, you are but a baby in all your lifetimes spent searching for your soul.
Diabolical…if it were a red day and I had a nice face to wear out with cursive words and beauty dribbled out the corner side of yellow eyes, where the tears hide the drinks.
You must have mistaken me for someone you know that you don’t know who knows you. I apologise on your behalf.
Lick shot, sunrise falls on tongue, and I am pinched by delight, left side of bliss, chose not to cry out in pain as long as the lash was held by her velvet tone, ruby green, we match eyes in the void, between the world we made up at play, a schoolyard of imagination, where paupers are crowned with time.
Not much left to see, to sigh, to say you were always at the centre of planets orbiting secret longings in the open and closed book of my life, indecipherable, I spoke only once in our lovetime to call you home, you belong inside of me, sheltered with my moonscraping day dreams that start where others finish their sentence. Lifers on the run, we race around the infinite questions, to chase a moment we never outlived, outloved, out of sighs, out of sight, seeing and knowing without and within your silence. I belong inside of you.
In sight….
I see with foresight the burning, naked and aged skin that sheds its fears to reveal a doubt which weighs heavily on the water that contains the boat of promises, still wet and unclean as misguided infancy and the harbour that yields to the shame.
A codependency of misfortune. A child raises its parent, addicted on the imposter serum mislabled as power. Every miscellaneous shell of a citizen has walked the plank. The inquisition has been and gone, and the version of future that is being foretold has cast its judgement on history.
We are the here and now and the dead and gone. Both tied to past denial and the second coming of delusions. What is a country, if its offspring can claim to not recognise its swollen face, with eyes leaning over the balcony to survey the dead of hope, whose bones protest while the dogs strip off the flesh of indignation, clean of evidence. And what of mothers who sought out land within that hostile terrain to make an idea out of dispossession, four walls of tender to tame the patriach’s emasculated by conquest and subjugation? A father’s name carries only the tide and its tongues, of tribulation and tribe but to which child does a country belongs to?
Hindsight is…
A body of water and blood where we drown our morning sorrows, again. And threaten to sleep with our decaying spouse hung by the terror that was born in us.
….2020
Clementine kisses you on the nose. Rose button drowned in your eyes. I drank your milk of kindness through my lies. Red wine and coke, you must play through the madness. Best thing you ever heard in your blindness. Muted tongue on pause bites the lip that feeds you. I remember what mama told me. And I remember you. Oh so tall in stature till they bent you over the bullsweat. They have teeth to match your fangs. And tongues of fire to heat up your secular soul. It burns just as hot on the outside of the inn. Keep it. She’s a keeper said nobody but your gentrifried mind. The flame dies but twice. Let it burn like the bushes of vanity, skin deep and heart swept feet off the ground, you put the foot in the mouth but forgot to bite down on it. Deep dead on it. Liver for the thrill. Killer of sheep you ran through the mill on a goose chase for the ages. Bronzed behaviour patterns after laughter and the clock is tocking.
Napoleon Dozier's Dabbler's Hand 