The best part of the sun, where it melts away for its own reflection.
To prove something.
We stand in snake skin and
leopard print, digging for
bones of the extinct
while money blows up the noses
of our youth.
I thought about you today.
Your early reflection smoking
life into you,
black coffee lungs watching the sunrise bring life into
the rest of us.
My skin is hanging up now.
I am melting away for my reflection to do the same.
To prove something.
Some eyes open like black holes,
gravitationally throwing memorial stones through a moment,
letting time break a silence that lingers in every muscle,
every finger tip
for a soft crash of acknowledgment.
Other eyes move like flat lines and we must guess. Ache drips from our palms like candle wax, hot with the stench of regret
and blame.
I remember the first taste of his
time, brutal pine in November’s icy driveway. I know his eyes opened
to our flavor together,
but now he walks in such a quick
rush; as if the Earth might split without eating him up
and he talks,
like voices do
when they should,
but not one blink wrinkles,
or speaks,
or loves.
It is hard to believe in a dead man,
a ghost,
a life,
a life of a ghost man….
a life that hands my limp direction
over to those that can control it.
They must have told him,
the people,
that his core was rotting,
that his brain was infested and crumbling?
That his daughter was sick with
raw nerves and would never get better?
If the bombs in Vietnam hadn’t sawed his
spirit away,
if his own father
hadn’t dangled lily liver from
the ceiling,
maybe he would have heard
the people,
the ghosts,
the whispers of his daughter’s twisted,
raw nerves grasping
for contact
and saved me from rotting with the same
crumbling infestation.
You who are with me,
who ache with me, please,
lay still, hold your breathing –
we are sinking
we sink,
beneath wings of bad mothers,
through sad voices of home
our dead limbs fall off,
our bones sleep on their own.
You who are with me,
who are silent at night,
who separate stars, who burn with out light
hold on
hold on
to the hands of these words
we are sinking
we sink
through this very dry Earth.
God isn’t softening,
we are starved by disease,
by darkness, by deepness
of the valley’s between us.
You who are with me,
who ache life away, lay still,
hold your breathing,
hold on to your life,
we are sinking
we sink
away with the night!
maggiemaeijustsaythis 