Thursday, January 9, 2014

fairytales that flit from sight when my sight may flit to find

I've nearly lost my balance on the steep slope of a skittering grin, each morning's weight settling into my threadbare pockets like a flour sack of mealworms. Unevenly I keel upon feet sliced by broken-glass teeth, slick with drool and the dead snow and brown ice that gasps upon losing your boot to your will. My veins are ivy run thick with mustard and slow as morning smoke, the smoke that barely sighs itself a shape, a ghost born weary, born only to melt waxwings in sunbeams.

Were that I were to be a seer, or a clown or a drinker of women, or a clock with its hands stolen, knowing and loving only the midnight chime in my bones, or a goat with its yoke dragging in dust and its cart forgotten, or aboard a boat in portage between eyelid black and iris blue, would that I were able to dance myself through day's distress and night's preoccupations, would that I would finish wrestling these bears who break my bones for a long enough song to admit my terror at the ants that inflame my feet.

Cut me as you would an apple to show its star, and you will find my cloven body the bisection of a wasp's nest, these paper chambers all I can see when I finally beg to dream. Here now when my mind stills do they come gurgling up through the plumbing and sliding down the simpering flagpole, here now when rest gently threatens with crackling fur my busy ears do they prick my dulling drums, whispering fairytales that flit from sight when my sight may flit to find, leaving only an afterimage of piss in a shitcan.