Shirtless

Starring The Murk

You put your hand in old water and pull it out, rattling little stars. The water was made of earth, before it was blue night. Something there? A bottom-glinting, a coin or an eye. Humble fish slip, freaking in the low oxygen, dumb laughs stifling everything. This is not hip or good. The fish are mainly dogs. One made you his companion and you spent the whole night wandering sleepless, fake-lost, telling yourself that you are yourself, just so you could have a plan.

No one is here with you, your family is here with you, they go to the places where you wander.

Then the light got in and you tore your hair and clattered to the floor, necklaces scattering all over, your skeleton. That frame of things has its way of seeing. You solve it like a puzzle and it jumps all over you, a family of mudsharks, or bears, or not yes, but surely a harrowing moment, thin in the air. Then the water ripples again and you see edges are crackling things, edges like the slim silver trails that made you. The bright broken fantasies, like the outline of horses, that bore you to the flood. You were delighted to be heavy.

Why do your joys feel like they don’t belong to you and yet your fears you own?

Then the bitten thorn of youth trembles in the skin and the bungled world engages you, riles you up, trips you in the murk. The murk is your land. It is all dim and a triumph of fog. Your inky body, your tumult. You foam the murk with your eyes and hands and can’t deny the damp breath of dank things.

That had a ring to it, when you closed your eyes back there, and shifted to the sitting still portion of your adulthood.

The fire went up and we were something like alone with our thoughts, and our waiting. I am alone with my waiting, and it’s good. It’s at least an oval. And then the hard breath comes, us falling in the drink of salted slush. Us falling forward and back-masking even these stymied words.