The air is dark with holes of memories
that gush through the pores of my life and
fill my heart with horror.
The darkness rises up my calves and thighs
and I know what life means,
in my own hideous and tormented way.
The sun hits against the walls of my mind,
pouring in through eyes wide closed,
trying to choke every last dark feeling.
They never go away
but you – you’re gone
and they smile.
Grounded bird with
Dirty
Wings of muddy feathers
Slipping into any jetstream
With reckless abandon.
Tiny dancer moving
On a stage meant for sound
And the medium loses my message
As your body drifts away –
Following your heart.
Time drips down my face,
A raw egg on a hot day
And the sweat becomes it.
I don’t remember when the days began –
Or when the memories started to be –
But the hits keep rolling where credits should be.
One day into another with
No apparent break or end
And every breathe becomes me.
Hands crawl across the face of a clock –
I laugh so deep down nobody hears me –
And the bird and I become the same.
I was never much for dancing, but you and I could dance all night. Your poetry was soft and your love was hard. I danced on the edge of a life I knew would end. I watched you, a caterpillar; turn into a butterfly. I woke up to a caterpillar in the morning.
It’s hard making chalk lines to live your life inside. My mind wanders over each line and into something, or someone, else. I play on my brain like a clunky, old broken-down keyboard at a yard sale – not mine, not really, but it’s the game I’ve got. Everything looks like a nail when all you have is a hammer, and my head is a hammer alone.
I look for limits to my mental states and find none. I look for the flashes of The Real coming back to roost, but the birds are gone. I have them carved onto my chest to remember being so close to them, because I don’t feel them like I did before. They’re my children that never visit, but I hope they’re dead and not thriving. I hope they never call again.
I keep building nicer – and bigger – tombs for my empty self. I pour it into the lavishness of luxury apartments, and now a house, in the hopes that nothing comes home to roost. I smile with the smilers and laugh with the laughers and nobody keeps score.
Somewhere wings are flapping – it’s getting late. I know I should go, but can’t we dance to one more song? I close my eyes and feel your breath against my neck and shoulder. Nobody gets a second song and I know my eyes tell you that when they yell at you. We all love to dance on someone else’s dime – we never want to be the one to pay so we keep hopping in and out of beds and heads and hearts.
Love is a losing game, but we hurt each other like life is zero sum. I should mind my P’s and Q’s and cross my T’s and I’s, but maybe I want to pay dearly. My dear, I feel I have already. We walk – wounded – and crawl, cradled in fake love and a false sense of confidence. He doesn’t deserve you, they thought, but nobody deserves what we do to each other.
Life is not all that much to lose, but love – love is. Love makes the ticks tock and the beautiful dance continue. The shell that remains is broken in the places it used to play and an abhorrent tragedy of leaves. A thumbnail cut a week ago – now dry, cracking and tasteless. The dust comes for us all, and becomes us. But love – love is. That’s the best game in town.
You beautiful tree,
I want to dance with your roots.
I want to water your leaves and
peel off the bad bark that hurts you.
I want to pour the sunlight into your eyes
and watch you live.
Walls can’t hold you anymore and
neither can I.
I cry at the dancing memories –
always fading –
and break my face on hard edges.
My cheeks wait for your cold hands
and life laughs as the wrinkles grow
and copulate like dirty rabbits.
The snowy fur stains dark
so that the snow is not white,
even if and only if the snow is white.
Home is a heart stuffed in a sock drawer –
cozy, seeping and warm –
until it can’t live here anymore.
Arms and legs need to stretch and wings –
oh, boy think of the wings! –
they need to crease and move and be alive.
We don’t get wings anymore
and we have to walk or sometimes run
until all we can do is crawl,
again.
The years feast on my flesh,
entering through another bottle
joint or lie,
as the guilt eats my life.
I could have known better,
but I didn’t and here we are to
enjoy all the little pieces left over.
Life is an old ham sandwich with
too-little mustard on a Christmas platter,
dancing in your desire’s eye
and never filling you up.
I am biting the core of the apple and
burning the torch at both ends – as I hold it –
at the pubs with old friends or new lovers.
The pretty, young girls talk sweet and dumb
with fistfuls of attitude and instagram self-worth.
The older women want me to love their flaws
and fuck them younger, but I won’t.
We all play this dance until we’re bored,
lonely and numb from breathing
as the frosty air stings our nasal cavity
and the beer is crisp and bland.
“She’s crazy,” said the man-boy,
with more mother issues than Cottage Life,
to me – to ME! – the dark-man who always
lives in the shadow of his depression
and refuses to be happy or stick around.
The parade of the deranged and broken
trumpets along through dreams of
Bumble, the bars and many beds.
Bukowski said nobody finds the one,
but he’s wrong and angry and a boy-child like us,
we’re all too busy ghosting or swiping left on her.
Andy Veilleux 