Often Should You Feel That Thing It’s Said You Feel

 

Often Should You Feel That Thing It’s Said You Feel

 

You’ve often felt something that’s said

brings heart’s rivers to arid heads,

like spent matches stabbing egg speck eyes

boxed in a Judas' pocket book of lies

signed with feathers by Big Chief I Spy,

except in truth they prick from either side.

You took corners by blistering stinging nettles,

whistled Colonel Bogey, something by Strauss,

feel steel traps tugging at the mouth,

the thumping timpani and drummed kettle

march on tinnitus bridges between ears,

you’ve heard it persist for years and years,

and can insist it is not real;

only a cave's hollows that you feel,

hardly a little effort to block it out.

Blood orange sunset forecasts drought,

where water will not spring there still,

so you think perhaps it never will,

but squeeze sponges and you might yet spill,

listening to tumbling voices impeach

in trapped faces, each to the other speak,

hustle one then the next to be heeded,

preserved in spring water for when needed,

because you stoppered and bottled this

and sealed the deal with a last salt kiss.

And, anyway, who stakes some claim to better life

must cut his cord with keenest knife,

for it is certain you are luckier than most,

distant voyaging to a far, far better coast

than anything this far you have ever done,

so it comes, it comes, in foreign suns,

by the rubbing of blood lids with blunt thumbs.