Sadness swells like the lungs
of a neophyte skydiver.
Still, I don't care
to compare apples and oranges or
something more radical — figs.
These things happen, leaves leave trees.
I dig my guts like pulp, reveal a seed, analogy;
as cranial is to brain, my love for him is hate
or something greater
than a melon dropped from sixteen stories up.
My mailbox is pocked with bills
and letters from physicians.
The pain is greater prior to the pills.
Lie still and stiffen.
My wit is somewhere chin-down in a field.
The only phone I own
silented Friday.
A crowd of clouds is gathering
as if to see my tits.
No shit.
I send twice-salted wounds one way
towards bed rest — fold down
the sheets of whys and hows at least
my bowels are regular
my toilet to its eyes with tried prescriptions.
Like little pollen tufts we find
ourselves in fields of wheat, of rinds,
of cotton balls and stalks and sheaths
and scraps of feeling good once.
The earth is at an angle with these feet
of mine, divided by my vision.
Aligned, aligned, aligned: 3 stars the night.
Triumphantly I sigh, let loose my lungs.
My mind ventriloquists, my dummy lips move,
We're in this minute, let's not fight,
we might knock out the lights of love's apprentice.
Unless we slap with feathered hands
and speak with tongues of fleece
we'll land in tangled heaps of strings and gut knots.
Possibly, you laugh. The stars now absent.
K.R. Copeland is the Art Director for Unlikely 2.0. Please check out her bio page.
"Because Tony drove Himself off a Cliff" first appeared in Copius Magazine. "Hashing it out with the Linguist" previously appeared in Cranky 2005.