Mountain Goat and Peace Holsters

Say sun, once more. I don’t know if this was right. I don’t want to do a damn thing which I don’t want to do. Soon it’ll be winter again, the start of it, November, when you feel milled over and resolved enough to remember me. The reckoning day’ll come far earlier than this, though not early enough to entirely shock me. Excess resilience is resuscitating who’d otherwise fare kindly from a bucolic release to bone meal fertilizer in the great plains. Waiting around for the weight to topple me — it just won’t — wondering to each and every passing car, if you were sad enough, would you sacrifice my life for your own? They just won’t.

I curbed myself on Rockwell and Le Moyne and it felt like the first time. There was a similar thought back in Corpus Christi, with the half-accident in the truck and the half-sandwich and half-lover and full-totality of vehicle — as if suddenly I’d woke and the demon hinged overhead was not one but myself, dangling saliva and slurping it back in, a half-nightmare. Each morning, now, the uneven dial of the ceiling fan strips its own paint and litters my scalp in tiny white roses, asbestos roses which I’ll rinse by touch and braid what’s left into your so-called slut strands. I always assume there’ll be pulling. We functioned on different sleep schedules until we just stopped sleeping altogether. You’d listen to me pace from below, and I’d add rhythm to my steps to tell you I wish you’d come up again, I wish we’d never done this, I miss you, I miss you. Canyon to crater, crater to dimple, dimple to atrophy. Had I known the speed of cell regeneration before you asked for the sun, maybe I’d have hesitated. I hope you laugh when I say something like this. Impulse control was never my strong suit.

You and I both knew you deserved someone with a deeper holster for peace and an outstanding ability to look past that of your own, the past, so I have to wonder if she knows. The betrayal wasn’t my own anymore. I felt sick, holding all the rackets on the sidelines, watching you trade in and out, watching the ball smack the space between my eyes, repeatedly, waiting for a medic to squish my temples and hold fingers up for me to guess at.

I made you out to be so much more than you were. I licked up every puddle you leaked, designing a martyr and growing stronger all the same. There were sprinklers throughout the building and I covered the detectors with cupped palms, reassuring you, kissing you and waiting for you to kiss me back, saying, Oh it’ll pass, don’t worry, don’t worry, it’s just a little drill. I made you out to be so much less than you wanted to be. I saw the good in everyone but you after so long, and then I stopped seeing the good in myself. I ushered you into Dogheaven, latched you in, concussed and naive I scratched at the door for years, begging you to let me back in, begging you not to leave me in your messes. My stomach was full as a drunken puppy and I couldn’t keep up. Each time I’d vomit you up I’d beg you to rub my back.

I was always one to wake enough for a fresh glass of water in the morning but not enough to keep from falling back to sleep. The waking is easy, all to say, the staying awake, is not. It’s difficult to remember how tight the air felt those days. It’s always the wrong things to fade first.

I couldn’t say it aloud. I’ve wised enough to understand who they’d send and what they’d do to me if I did. It’s become so hard-fought, the sentences I contrive, Have you heard the story about the mountain goat? What story? The one I’m about to tell? The one I’m extemporizing as I breathe?

I can’t send you back. Say it again, one more time. I can’t send you back. Look up and say it again. I can’t send you back. Look with me, directly into the sun, look and say it again.

Art;

Plate Eight, from Petit Traite de Morale

1968 Hans Bellmer

Etching on white Japanese paper

https://www.artic.edu/artworks/100328/plate-eight-from-petit-traite-de-morale