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I/you watch me/you. Herb Powers I watched you live out your dying days, held hands and stared at tubes often too big and unreal anchored beneath your skin. Once I had a wish and it was that you would live to walk with me hands-in-hands with the children’s’ children. But that was taken away from me. It was burned and buried at sea in a viking burial. Those flaming arrows of our existence, shot from behind darkened blinds, open out into the fresh seabreeze of gulls and salt-air. I watched you. And how badly I wished that I had made a carbon copy of you before you left. Or given even the smallest extra sacrifice to blaze your fire. Instead something grows inside that feels cannibalistic and I know that animals that eat of their own often become sick from themselves. That’s my disease: an internal grey that comes when my stomach acid turns over and rolls against itself, boils and beats into my sides. Your watching me. I can often feel your eyes as they peek through the slits in the blinds of my consciousness. Goodbye your wavering smile; a face I’ve left behind on the dock as I sail toward a new world. The natives of a tribe unknown-until-now can’t decide whether to king me or cut my head off. I have always understood the origins of this manner of confusion. Your watching me write this. Watching me play in the light that destroyed you with the same searing flame. Laughing through some thickness: where I can’t quite see you. And all that was once lively and hypnotic rolls with us in some dizzy and airlined hallucination. You are the tide, the auspicious winter moons that brighten tundras. Roll with me in this dizzy and airlined hallucination. |