In A Mailbox Waiting

A long walk through fields in which daisies cannot find themselves. Salvation passes, eighteen wheelers humming in the distance, clouds falling like half-drunk grandfathers. There are chord changes that only make sense several bars later. There are funerals, stolen bouquets, and Christs who hang twenty years on their crosses. Oh lift me won't you on your strong and holy shoulders skyward?

Rain again. "Send me dead flowers to my wedding/and I won't forget to put roses on your grave." Oh how happy back roads make me, unfolding to as far away as Kentucky. Is it possible some pain you never surrender? Because of you my soul sleeps quietly in a mailbox waiting for a letter it can't itself compose.

There were days that began with whiskey, nights that ended in a veil of fusty promises. Poor lonesome stranger indeed. Upholstered chairs that have seen more miles than me encourage a religious disposition that - as yet - I have refused. What do roses know about limitations that you don't? Mama I got those infidelity blues again.

How many dogs have to break my heart before I learn I have no heart? In my dream, libraries burn, and whole languages are forgotten, and still I can't find a real silence. Dan, if you are reading this, please write, I am so sad and lonely. You can't agree to death, you can only refuse life a little longer. A poetry of rest, cold water, kisses that bring you all the way to where longing ends.