September 25, 2011

I will make time a cadaver
Crunch it down
Upon a table-top, stretch out its limbs
(Unconscious rhythm dripping from my fingers, like a stumbling drunk.)
But time, again: try to uncover its power over potential,
How within a ten-words-minute, a future is smothered in its bed.

We talk, you talk, I stumblingly agree
Agree, against my mind, that hollow tree.

In books, and only in books I find my face, scrunched
In so many lines and dots, glaring out with sunken eyes
A monkey rattling the bars of his cage.
But when you say,
"How does it feel? What right have you?"
I force out words like "Awesome" or "Rad" or "Not bad at all."

I complain about small talk, claim it's nothing more than small,
That neither you nor I have stock in porous, shrinking 'small'.
But ask me how my fingers weave through sentences at all,
Ask me how my marrow aches when eyes meet in the hall
And ask me how I beg the fates for anything at all.
And I'll dig through my pockets, my hands shaking like winter bones,
Reaching for my words, the ones I'd chosen from before
But I, a father laden with groceries at the front of the line,
Splatter a handful of coins on the counter, mumble "Keep the change"
And escape.

How my words pile up, the ones I never thought.
How they dribble down my window panes,
How they rot. How they get into my ears and hold me to my chair
Or drag me through the hallway by my hair.

I'd rather sit in sea-side caves, and watch the broken waves
Wrap around each other.
If I bent down, and with a bottle caught one straggling wave,
A young one, not quite old enough to stay in stride with the others,
And brought it home with me,
It would sit, inanimate, no longer a wave,
Just water. I could coax it, tickle its chin,
And there it sits.