"Oh, You Are the Roots That Sleep Beneath My Feet and Hold the Earth in Place"
I told Father it was me
sitting waiting watching in that tree
a gull perched on the thread of mockery
so high- the smell of honeysuckle
nursing, latching onto me
the way iodine stings on my thumb
or the way she smells like potpourri.
But it’s all nothing, a train ride to nowhere,
a huffing breathless instance of life
that jerks into a halt of silence
at its moving-sitting-still destination.
And I meandered along
with the weight of her bosom and my hands and
the everlasting ongoing continuity of that damned watch
ticking ticking in its self-assured wrongness
all neatly packaged in a rectangular box
and tied up with a little string.
It’s easy if you try.
Did you? Did you?
You can’t know anything
but that second-hand smoke
filling your lungs with knotted up gnats
that skim the surface of the water’s edge
as you look too close at your own reflection.
That, sir, is what we call tragedy.
And if you’ve never tasted the fruit of the tree,
if you’d never have had it at all,
how can you know? You can’t know.
I’m caught in a haze of drowsing infinity,
a slipping fleck of a shadow on the sun
that mindlessly drones on in assimilation,
a yellow ant on the floating log that is my future
unwinking, motionless, stirred about in my
weak-coffee-dust-stalemate existence.
And not a soul knows.
It’s lonely. Breathless.
The vines creep in when it’s dusk, and the smell
of hot damp worms comes wafting in
as the lights under my hands turn on to show the way,
and the fishbone is still lodged in my throat.
I try to spit it out, but it’s stuck there.
Do you care now?
Did you? Did you?
You don’t have to if you don’t want to.
It’s just
your gasoline lips
pressed against my nose
my swan-throat
my dead face.
I am an accumulation of nothing.
I is the saddest word of all.
And nobody knows what I know until I is not.