Let's Make Bombs

You can scrawl frantic post cards to your hero’s and laminate your good intentions but it won’t change the fact that I’m gone.
The sour apples you cut your teeth on bruises, reflecting to you what could have been but wasn’t.
Put your case in a basket, you’re a basket case you fruit.
Sweet, battered.
Diced and doused, baked.
The problem is you can’t eat your cake once you have it--melts in your palms or scorches and sears your flesh.
You can mail away your expectations but you don’t have the return address.
Demi-gods and semi-gods and gods that linger between church pews and the pursed lips of fathers and sisters won’t answer your fan mail--busy writing lists.
Slamming doors and pushing pencils as they plaster on your grin.
You can’t fax, text, e-mail, upload, download, reload, refresh a feeling once it’s stapled to your chest.
Your watch is ticking and the showers running but time is standing still.

My arms are beaten a festive blue and yellow
Pounded into shape and form by an anvil the shape of your dysfunction
Broken bones from clinging to your tailpipe—exhausted,
Fumigating the thoughts in my skull like parasites and tapeworms
Wondering when it’s your turn to crawl.
Crossing vast deserts on horseback with a destination of utopian landscapes and rivers—from your hairline to your belt loop
Has lead me to discover a dystopia that I can’t seem to grasp
I was scouring the borders of the broadest places, searching for you in sand dunes when in essence you were drowning.
I watched your lungs fill with water for three weeks and suddenly I couldn’t breathe.

The equation doesn’t balance, a handful of broken glass and a two-by-four don’t build a house--
Can’t even fathom a bridge for you to cross on all fours.
Yet somehow erect a cinder-stone wall lined with Velcro on both edges, repeatedly hook and looping me into a headstrong battle of conviction with an inanimate object.
There is greater satisfaction in giving a vagabond his roots than cabin fever it’s circumvention.
I stripped down to a sense of silence, shrugged my shroud of verse and language in favour of your minute words.
When you retreated to your censorship a hush fell over my naked shoulders and the sentences I had wrapped myself in like an aluminum emergency blanket evaded me.
The paragraphs of prose and poetry that once walked me home were now the things that followed me there, lurking in the shadows and taunting me with my inability to confront.

Now I’m following bread crumb trails of one night falls that I can’t seem to stand for,
and poking sleeping bears and dragons just yearning for a different kind of calamity,
waiting for the day when the fire in my chest is extinguished or replaced with a malleable block of ice.