Tuesday 7/04/2006 12:48:00 AM

When it's dark I am powerless. Or is it dark because I am. I'll never know for certain until the day I learn to survive without these things that fill my waiting graves with imposter deaths. Dying like a comet does. Falling the only flight there is. Spitting on gravity for the brief moment that these paper wings please the wind.

I've not forgotten, just don't want to admit, that I still think about what this day means.

Camping out in the wilds of my own home. Conversations with disembodied voices. They only understand the choices they offer. No other responses. Just like anyone does.

Don't try to say it differently. Just answer with what they want you to say. It's dark in here and I'm waiting for a truck. A man with a ladder to come and reattach the wires that used to carry my voice from here to there. In quiet sighs that never bothered anyone. Small flashlights vying against the absence of all those many streetlamps.

We live in the wilderness. Of the mind. Thick jungle lit up like stadium. Until that battery dies.

2:23am and still not a sound. Just movies watched by no one that so resemble ones I've already seen. This came before, but no one noticed. The poetry is gone from imagination.

No one sees it. Or cares if they do.

I can't hear anything when it's this quiet. All that silence gets in the way. Life is loud and obnoxious. A tether ball game of bruises skin never shows.

There's a window in every question. And broken glass in every answer.

Six hours. Maybe seven.

Or longer.

Can't complain when mercy is in the hands of another.

| Alcoholic Poet Home |
Copyright 2005-2021. All Rights Reserved.