Watering Can
I want my death to catch a cold.
I want my respectable/demure years to get something terminal.
You made me sleep through years and important things.
It’s my turn now to make you know how life feels being bed sick.
I want to be the sediment in the pond that can’t get to the river fast enough,
So it can experience the tumultuous journey to the ocean.
I want self-hate to run as fast as it can before I choke it with my barren hands.
I own this sweat, this blood, these crazy thoughts, these fingerprints.
These grubby fingers just want to grab everything and mark them.
I am crazy as a dog in a neighborhood of hydrants,
needing to somehow mark my spot, my presence.
I have been a great drifter.
I loved the roads, the architecture of this nation, the paths
And the places I’ve been taken. I have never known God as I have when I drift.
Some would argue it’s because I’m lost,
But I live to be lost. I see so much more of the holy world
When destination is not my focus. Some would describe clouds as weightless.
Surely, they are not. They are filled with sustenance.
It’s impossible to not appreciate the rain and weather cycles
That bring food to our tables. Clouds drift and are certainly holy.
My heart is hooves of galloping horses kicking in a stall.
I have no words for death. I do know when you get intimate with that word,
There is no ring I could trade now for the freedom to bleed.
Why is it that we have to leave before we can hear it all:
The gorgeous things the night frogs are saying, the long sentences
Of the pleasures of the body, the prayer of sunflowers swaying in a breeze.
I can’t tell you how to see things, to listen, to see the world,
But the intensity of the thunderstorm, just cannot be denied by me
As anything but one hell of an intense prayer. The way my body feels
When it dances with no rules and lets passion lead, that’s my body
Telling a higher power I need to be let out, open me like you do flower petals at night.
Maybe I’m better because they told me I might be dying.
I have never been one to dream of speech. I say it or I don’t,
But I have avoided places that scared me. It seems
Now that you seem to be telling me, you know where I might not be,
I go there. I soak it up. I water the God there,
And I am learning when I do this
I sprout.
Oak Roads: Poetry and Musings 