AND THEN SHE LEFT

She went away. I touched her and felt her like I used to. I could smell her on my skin. I never wanted that to go away. I never wanted to have to forget. But I did, finally, and I showered, and I washed it all away. I felt the soap insult my knees from the burns of the night before. My knees were torn, and my spirit was torn more. What a girl. What a girl that I can only have in measures, a girl I believe to be so incredible, and as much as I can believe that, even after all these years, I can't convince her how we are not an accident. We were meant to be together, and I believe that shall never transpire. And in the end, the sting of burns on extremities was the least of my pain.

And this time, unlike most times, I might have not done it the same way.

AUGHT AND SEVEN

I walk more slowly in the rain.
From noon to nine, the Hades pan of August,
All around me withering,
Formerly green grass crackling beneath my feet,
The terra like the thinning dome of
A middle-aged man,
And me only in my thirties,
But most days in the deep broil of August,
I am both older and younger,
The stride and sex of a teen
And the sleep hours and boredom
Of a man twice my age.

Even the rain as it steams around
Can do little for the ground as it were,
As it lay there dying and bristling,
The horse hairs of a fiddle bow,
And not even its own song to play,
Just the wail of waning, the far-cry
That fetches ears from the fallen,
No more than the decrescendo of all that
Ever must end, and all that must end
Is everything et al.

I weep for the grass just as the sky does for me,
Stung by the sadness of its soliloquy,
No one to hear it refrain as it fades,
Over and over,
Those August Blues Number Aught and Seven,
Quieter and almost inaudible,
And in thirty more years, thinner and thinner by the scalp,
Just a parched plain of earth and skeletons of foliage,
A future I can envision to such a degree that I
Always walk more slowly in the rain.

REVIVAL

At the Bethel revival
Their dialect came out in song,
Hymn after hymn,
Prayer after benediction,
Invitation. An invitation to come,
O Lamb of God,
I come.
Their joyous praise echoed
Through the walls of downtown
As I sat,
Punctured at the corner of my arm,
Large-gauge needle in my vein.
I could only hum along with them
With no manner of moving my arm
And no strings in sight to fret.
When they came to the chorus
Of that lauded old tune
That so many slur in their southern dialect,
I thought about what it meant to be washed
In the blood of the Lamb,
Looking down at the vermillion vital fluid
As it flowed out of me. It occurred to me
That some are so blessed as to
Bleed out, bleed out so slowly,
Five or ten minutes, maybe even
Twenty,
Those who have the time they need
For meditation, for surrender
For acceptance, a final invitation
To the fold before they fold.
I imagined, then, that I could bleed out
At that very moment
And pass quietly, peacefully, without question,
That those
Passionate notes of mispronunciation
Would be a guide light to the beacon
That would lead me home,
The light unto my path,
My path toward the light.
For those others, for those that are not
Given the time that one needs
To bleed out, I prayed,
Prayed for a different type of peace,
Another kind of aura of welcome that might come
From the quickness, the speed with which
They might be taken. I prayed that
No one
Might ever have to die in fear
As the man carefully applied the bandage,
Pulled the needle from my vein,
And asked me to raise my arm,
To just lift my hands toward heaven
And praise the Lord.