a life of a ghost man

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.

Shipwrecked

When it is day, I do not recognize
this land. We live on
moonlit love and hard water
soaked in oak barrels.

When sunlight takes over
this land, I do not recognize
his hands that
lay me to rest with Strigiformes
and kiss my skin to death

his voice blurs my vision
when it is day, he is
not him
he is a reflection of a
fermented sea I drown in

every night,
when I swim away from this
foreign land I live on.