Wet Matches, or that bird outside my bedroom window that most likely had brain damage.

I have longed too hard and too deeply for cold rivers as shallow as

Tide pools without the colors of coral

And small fish.

No compensation of composition.

No excuse I can give for my constant over-reaching, extending the muscles behind my shoulder blades to

A tightrope,

Sure to break,

Soon.

Loved too much of the weight of unforgiving stone, porous in the hand

And fickle, so fickle

Cracks through the surface, salt to the tongue,

Cut my thumb to blood ribbons trying to skip them across some lake I used to call home.

I see my eyes in the sink

To the bottom.

Carved my name into places I should not have dared to

Think of, let alone sit on top and

Stay

For hushed hours, months, years,

The silence of a summit intended to be undiscovered.

How different my pictures would look now

Had I learned to love

Right

Proper

Properly

I am chattel that learned to

Love the spike of an electric fence.

The one that never “turned out quite right”.

Like the bird that flew

Into my window every morning,

Knocking feathers loose, a cut upon the head,

And doing it again the next day.

He loved the dirty glass of my bedroom window like

A wrong place and a wrong time and an always-wrong

Person,

(I’m sure the bird eventually broke his neck)

Wet match in November when trying to light a cigarette –

“You know, those things might kill you?”

“The fire very well might, too.”