Christmas Morning ‘18

Where did you go?

I remember spring days

the shadows were long that year

my tube socks were pulled down until they bunched like day old donuts at my ankles.

I spent a lot of time outside those months

just feeling the cool spring breeze

the kind that clings to the part of your elbow

the part that looks like a ballsack.

I was heartbroken

torn in two, one end clamped down to the dirt

crimson and ruby raindrops fell as it was shorn

and lifted away towards heaven.

Dripping down to cracks in the concrete slab that was the hearts replacement.

A beating, pulsing organ no longer, this monolith

now glutted

vowed to no longer yield.

Where did you go?

I look for you everywhere

in the mirror on the way out the door.

A snatch in the corner of my cornea.

A whiff in conversation.

There’s a tingle in that woman’s face

it pours over me like a deluge of blueberries muffins and shag carpeting

hiding the rot

lost in smoke.

I look for you in her eyes

curled at the foot of her lips

her head on my chest

a phantasmagoria of the wounded.

Who gave you this fear?

You threw me in the trunk and brought your shovel too.

Black bagged and suffocating you plunged me six feet

into the world.

And now with nothing more than a picture and a bucket

I wander the halls of the blind

blind men

unwilling or unbidden by pride to remain ensconced in darkness

pulled along by the vicious press.

The picture faded, the bucket long overfull

what’s the point of looking

I can’t recall your face or your manners

as real to me as a dream

living Polyphonically

residing in homes and crevasses

blinded by hate and hunger scratching a living on scraps

with this hateful creature I will go outside

have a smoke

it’s Christmas after all

the end result of a lifetime of second guesses

not this time

this time I got the reds and I’m pretty happy with it.