The Story

I'm not fucked up, I am writing a story.  I am turning back the pages and looking at a life. I narrow in, see it clearly from behind the cloud, a dewy god, that secret Tuesday in the field, Tom and I gathering sticks.  He laughs and I inspect the curve of his lips, his disheveled brown hair, the way he enjoys me.  The leaves are spotted, curled, we tumble like boys in twenty-seven-year old bodies. 

I am that dewy god, behind the cloud, laying me down in a creekbed.  The water rises to my mouth and runs like delicate glass, a cross-sectioned face.  Here there is no sound, the body tremors continents of shame, swept away to tributaries and oceans.  Didn't I reach down to touch the rocks that day in Wimberley?  When I was four feet tall?  Before I went missing?

Now I sit on a couch talking to a man with a notepad, a canteen.  His psychology diploma hangs on the wall.  He takes poems and firelight and lifetimes and synthesizes and systematizes and institutionalizes man.  He spelunks caves and writes volumes.  He lays me down on the operating table and tells me everything that is wrong with me.

The story comes in surges, I recollect, I make dioramas out of old shoe boxes.  A hand is a hand, a foot is a foot, the door is the door, and a bed is a bed.  In the hotel room I take my block of clay from art class and begin to sculpt a male form, a friend, perhaps even myself.  All I want is your touch, your clinging, the genetic memory of hands held and congregations of delight.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/comments/9jz680/sketch_of_a_recess/?utm_source=reddit-android

https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/comments/9k16y3/not_a_love_poem/?utm_source=reddit-android