Friend, never rollover.
With your expanded lungs
and your racing heart
there you hang,
swinging there
from ropes
as an explorer,
leaping from earth into night sky;
here you look back,
induce a feeling of awe
and we watch you,
we watch you
exhale stars, suns
popping up like acne
on our children’s adolescent faces.
Living day to day is hard, friend,
so we forever stay
changing,
changing in the sense of
experiencing time,
by asking questions
so that we learn,
and what we learn
is that our jungles camouflage
hunters;
black bodies with
lurking lead pipe tails,
green eyes slit and searching
for a meal. It’s only across the way
when a Vietnamese boy finds
unexploded memories he discovers
when plowing
his field;
watch exploding boy spray
in all directions
inside your mind,
a flash of boiling light, your
mind’s photo,
crackling like ice
in warm whiskey throats,
snow storming like a
locomotive down a mountainside;
watch and listen,
listen to tides rush
the windshield over,
buckle n snap;
underwater pressure
spiders the gap,
and up floats
tender meat
in boiling
rich soup as it
slowly turns from
pink, to gray,
spices clearing her
nasal passages to
meet snot and sweat on her lips,
and afterward she
stares up to the sky;
see these electrical lines
below the clouds connect
us to sky, they are tamed
lightning, like
a battery in your hands,
like you do,
like you are doing,
like you are scrolling,
like you click Like,
social media casting her
grand spell, Like it or
not.
In these cluttered city streets
car horns are like
crickets in small southern towns,
just a different species clamoring,
talking,
heating in the sun
or cooling in the night,
soon dead
and decaying
in the ground,
influencing beyond a
headstone in books he’s left us,
in personality traits passed on to
her kids,
living on in the imaginations
of the living.
Living,
I admit how
that moon in the sky
is our moon,
that sun up there
is our sun giving us life down here;
and down here,
content like a kid in
mama’s lap,
calm in daddy’s arms,
or all grown and alone and staring
into a sea of sharkfin mountain ranges,
I finally take a cool drink on
a hot day, and so
simply,
simply
things seem ok,
things can be ok when
taking a sip of cool
water, enjoying a few bites of
warm food,
looking to face
the stars along
these vines of a black n silver sky,
and it feels,
it seems
like things can be ok.