So I actually worked on poem during my lunch break. Thought ya'll might want to give it a look.
At least it's something.....
Preliminaries of the Engagement
He bats lashes lean as spider legs, turns humid-eyed at the echo of his father arranging coffin, hearse, pyre. Shuffles across the patio and sets the grim line of his mouth. Worries the flesh from my fingers, teeth from my gums, caps from my knees, the belt buckle loosened now.
We do not speak of mothers, of the car curled into the elm, of the fetal tuck of the limbs, of the shudder of branch and leaves and the grass that remained unbent beside the rear tires.
He withers into the lawn chair, soothes away scabs of rust with the pads of his fingers. Joints groan. Settle. Skyline is sullen with sandflies, the light grayed with rain, dour as the lips of the Low Country Atlantic, pursed against the shore. He swats, drawing blood – Mine. His. Welts rise in angry puckers.
We slump wet-faced, straining towards the rain; we prickle beneath the hole punch sky, and the porch steams, tiffin-hot.
We rasp, our mouths smoke-dry, chapped lips seizing his collection of foreign cigarettes. His eyelids wilt to closing, wet bulbs wandering beneath taut skin, brown sockets and purpled undereye.
He picks a continent and we stroll through memory slow-slow, categorize those byways like lover’s skin, fingertips skipping across spine and clavicle, plateau of sternum. Our tongues amble, lulling away grief. Sigh into him, a rasping of throat, and uncoil against thigh, hip, against the round vibration of his voice.
I smoke a Lebanese cigarette and explain Colombo, how you shop and learn the beggar’s smells, how the market-fish shine, how Thoo-rye-rath-inum twists their barrels.
Rainwater puddles, the color of ghee. His eyes roll to the milkwhites.
He wanders his lanes slowly – blood clotting in Kandahar and the glottal sound of bolted doors, the strays one-legged, fearing mines.
We quiver atop a tow missile, eyes cold with remembered night and sand, that feeling of grit beneath the lids.
Crush my cigarette into the cement. Pass him the Glock. And then that familiar snap, like a shucking, and he extracts the shells, turns the rounds in the dimming light.
