I get a rush blowing in with the smell of cicadas acrid on my breath.
I get the sense summer is going. Belongs to different.
I get the impression I've lost it all already, and all we're doing is
Countering. Call foul play.
Picking up my belly. Sharpening my scent. Offer him my cents, add up to nothing in the end.
I've wasted such a long time being rivulets of someone else's sister. Playful in the crook. Rock me with your empties.
I don't know how, and get the feeling there's nobody to ask. Panic.
I used to wear my knees bare. I used to clear my throat. Hard.
Make a nuisance of myself, make me proud. Have you been, lately? Not here, not now.
Alice and the hare come combing down. Used to read me stories at the mouth of the cave, now my nose and me face toppling downside up.
How do you say, I seem to have made a mistake?
And how to tell, I'm more wandering spirit each day?
Frightened of the things taken from me, but more so, of those I willingly gave away.
Stub my nose in the ashtray. Smoking's bad for you, I used to say.
Used to drive and chat up girls like you were counting, spinning on the nose of some tertiary life.
Dressed up to the nines, but only when your fox of a mother wasn't home looking.
No way to behave with girls half your age,
But I charged your dice willingly.
Spit in my throat,
That fight-back lick in your left eye.
Mine eye. Nine lives.
I'm known for my rubber cheeks, the asymmetry of my saxophone lying bare in the park. Early hours of our barrel-bottom lives. Lying barre in the park. Pin me up from school, pick me down. Clean my bones, or eat my dust?
Am I still in the driver's seat? Still winning? There was a time I thought I had, still, all my lives splayed out before me. Sploosh, and it's gone. The rim of my heel grow heavy until break glass. This is. The taste of summer wine.
We played. I laughed. Now your hairline's sounded the retreat, and I'm growing too slovenly for long summer days. Ask me to sleep less, except with each day, I become more a bear. Before this world fills my lungs, I need desperately to hide.
For tonight, I'll take off my clothes. Go sit on the porch. Wait for daddy to call me, and tell me I've failed. There's so much to do. So much to drink. Underwear all disarray, sore loser, careful about polishing my tack. I used to seize long summer mornings by the balls, now I just chew gristle and sit tanning my fat hide.
I've warned you before about my attempts at writing poetry. Still, I persist. I'm like a rash that won't go away. I am. Trying to make sense. Writing long letters, still, to the house with no return address.