When nephews spit and pitch boom sounds from their dark (yet sacred) caves, friend, this is a calm you will never find again. This radio knows your heart so well that it sings your static through its teeth. Its the only friend you’ve ever had. Burning pitch, booming sounds from your graves, each, the old ones and the new. When you lie to even the sky, and then get off on la la las (as I do, its so hard not to), this old lie it does creep, it clicks and beeps, this ratio knows your heart, sinks your fabric to its knees.
Your heart, it’s bigger than this room, your eyes are wider than the sound when your freckles go boom, when today’s sun switches to moon and throws its old gloom onto the carpets you had in college, the rooms where you made your first stains, the brandished photographs of exploding palms, the voices that sang you that best and only calm. But the dreams won’t come, and then there’s your boyfriend’s eyes. ..He has seen children in this land.....
They place their hands in warm pockets because snow finds them when they’re falling. In their pocket they may find that broken crayon, that splinter of wood, that cause they thought good. So worth it. They brandish their photographs of their fathers, those fools, palms together with clothed eyes. Over with boulders, they’ll seek grass as their closure come spring. The world will wear a sinister gown, and it’s your prom and then it’s your wedding day.
It kills you graveyard dead.
......
I have seen children in your head.
They are on ocean beaches, distant and dear. They poke their toes toward the center of the earth, as if to place their roots, as if to say, "I am here and I take root! Let me be!" But they are just children and those are just beaches, children are not trees. This is a truth if I’ve ever known one. I was on a train once and this woman approached me with glistening eyes. She told me that there were cracks in our stockade, she spoke of elks. I pulled her teeth with a feral rabbit’s beak. The smoke that billowed out from her fingers as she caressed my perfect body that night, against her gums, while the perfect sun orbited the perfect galaxy, the milky one, the bold, and what she said I’ll never forget. "No creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.".... ..As if to break me.....
That first night I could be found down by the refinery playing guitar with Travis, the smell of sugar beets, counting the stars, or the planes, or the satellites, depending on your belief or your view. It was what the poor once called the perfect night. I was there, holding onto my heart, as it skipped (as it had lots to do), singing my static through its teeth and gave birth back my spring. It’s the only friend I’ve ever had.
A bouquet of only one rose, I’ll take it. My hair will turn grey, steel, I’ll live to see it. Your hands will weld our heads together, look at what you did! You picked up the pieces, you easily fixed them, and now, like buds on dead branches, though I may not grow into what I should have grown, I will bloom before I fall. And I thank each of you for that. That I had a chance to bloom at all, in this pasture, before next winter calls.......
