breach

I came to swallow the cold with my fingertips, trekking barefoot through the snow

in West Virginia, the peaks of cedars resting sweetly sung as moss peepers on the edge of season, the teetering tots of bees. We were only feeling out the path, never meaning to actually traverse its waters or wend its way into our wretched minds, the roll of rocks down Sideling Hill, the trill, the try, the will-you-say-goodbye.  Will you look for me in the springtime, or under Walt’s boot soles?  Will you find me when I have fallen to my lesser, or better instincts?  Pluck me from my cauldron of simmering sighs?  I whisper lies so that you may, or may not, fully hear what I have to say, because you don’t really care anyway; otherwise, you wouldn’t have thrown the blanket I made in the dog cage, the leftovers in the trashcan, the future-in-laws next door, the white walls, the valium, the vacuum hose sucking out spare pennies from under the couch. The coins clack through the spinning filter like batteries snapping into place between the spring and the plastic: the ever lasting magic of new technology and hybrid theology, the biology of bending to the will of another.  Our fathers are shaving off layers of my brain like soft wood on a rusted blade, gone and made a mockery of the old errand: the masking of meeting someone and making them think you are real, stealing splices of conversations from a humid bar, and slinging them precariously over my shoulder blades again, and I would love nothing more, than to rip off my shirt in front of all of these assholes…the thing about being an asshole is, that you don’t call yourself an asshole, take hold of what’s been left for you, what’s been told to you about, once upon a time, there was obedience, and fairness of hand, and slightness of jaw.  Failing to find a lark, to be heralded by angels on chariots, bullwhipping their oily horses into red lashes of puckering flesh, and nodding, as if to say, these truly are the last of days, the waves are here to say so long.