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bex box : poetry : last letter

Last Letter to the Boy


tangling bed sheets, not destinies
every 15 minutes strange voices caution me; yesterday, they killed a man.

driving 55 not 30, like the sign suggests,
my blood is speaking, moving, mad-rushing back
to the ravines of my youth, the Tecumseh mornings,
sweat and skin, everything trapped between the two, and then some.

i'm going back, not to fondle the wreckage
but to lift it, to mismatch, blood-let & let go.
( inconsistency on all the doorknobs & the sticky sweet prints are not my own. )

downtown pine ridge. you were a fifth of old crow & nosebleeds
the king of dissipation. i fed you my tributaries,
looked up to see if they were well digested.
you swallowed my voice. holy, it was holy and
the little girl stuffing her feet into second rate sandals
at miss duff's discount threads, knew the words.

listen. you should have taken the posies i offered back in '97,
the insides, the outsides, everything in between.
you should have taken them and pressed them between
the pages of your e.e. cummings 1923-54.

men are looking and wanting them now.
ice trucks, boys in small cars, cadillac casanovas, guitarists, poets, vagrants;
they all gypsy around my blood like washed out watercolor,
thinning when the torrent hits, spreading when the leftovers of a seven day rain
begin to rush the spillway.

look. we are all murderers, plunderers, wasteland wanderers
good girls and boys. but you took the last of the amaretto, mixed it
with sunny delight, swigged, said it tasted like push-up pops in june.
said it tasted like heartache. like fingertips crawling up a spine.
like a reason to cry drunk. like bitterness. like the last letter to a boy
who took a utopia and broke it.

clutching handfuls of forgiveness, not pity
i'm going back to the ruins, back to the calico evenings &
cemeteries where we blended and coupled and created.

i'm going back.
not to uproot the girl, but to save her.




( there is an echo in the vale, and the sticky sweet vocals are not my own. )