An Exquisite Corpse 30 Days in the Hole

I

She rouses from a road bump,

spots me reading a book of poems,

and assumes me to be educated.

Her sweatshirt is rolled up like a bikini top,

unveiling her large stomach

with the pomp of a premiering vaudeville show.

She’s been unselfish since birth,

salt of the earth worth her weight in gold.

Sold down the river at her own demand,

she walked straight into our house of mourning,

wrapped her wise arms around my 11-year old frame,

and kissed my tortured mind.

She reminds me that spring is coming back for us;

we just have to spin the world a little more first.

But she’s been forgotten and forlorn,

become a run-down ghost town

whose people left her long ago in heart

before she lost them to industry.

And I write to her, to you because I loved, love, will love you

and I want to understand who you are,

who you were, and who you’re still yet to become.

Watch now how slowly a tear can form,

and then fall, when you’re crying

and think you have nothing

worth being sad about.

II

The sexiest thing you’ve ever said to me was

I want you inside me

and all my blood rushed center and down.

But you were supposed to be my sandbox, not my stone tablet;

there to make me realize how quickly I would die.

Our void grows contemptuous,

widens with each jealousy,

sprouts a new offshoot so green,

so doomed to be forgotten.

I hope your children grow up to be poets

so you’re never able to understand them.

I reread the printed letters from my lawyer,

make constellations of his patterned excuses.

I catch every person’s phone conversation

and reply to both ends, snatch their vested secrets,

could expose the truths of their youths.

But you haven’t read about me in your guidebooks,

and you’re not sure who to believe anymore.

III

Born of the same soured soil and tainted rain,

we did the only thing we knew how,

grew inward – tighter and tighter into each other,

hoping that our togetherness could save us

from the harshness of our surroundings.

But the darknesses we hold inside us –

deep and consuming enough to digest galaxies –

have somehow found homes in our foreign bodies.

We are eroding within, like our lost coast,

ever crumbling into the insatiable gulf

as grown men seek a fantastical world

where their monsters obey them

and not the other way around.

She had to have heard the morning moanings

of VHS vixens through thin walls.

Shut up, shut up, sit down, and get lost

in this sitcom rerun with him for the third time today.

His self-slapped golden handcuffs keep him

tight where his boss wants him,

marionetting stability and rigidity

as our former selves fight inside to stay alive,

waiting for the worst moments

to resurrect themselves in their familiar haunts.

He couldn’t domesticate the beast with obedience;

his training just taught him to gnaw the wrong things.

We want to be brackish,

but fear what we may kill in the process –

some just can’t comprehend the water’s ways:

filled only with soft breathing and flushed skin –

the work of an inexperienced child

who’d only before fucked women

to submission in his mind.

And your elegance and innocence couldn’t save you,

not this time.

One day, they’ll understand

the power of a peaceful moment,

the courage of calming the raging storms of their souls,

the wisdom of harnessing their ferocity for greater ends.