Weathered Wood

birdsandbones:

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.

Billy Collins

it’s been a very long time since i or my various body parts were exceptionally thrilled about anyone, and sitting at the candlelit bar of my restaurant tonight, the dark fire of aged rum and gingerspice in my throat, i thought about the ideal date with just such a hypothetical person of appeal.

i want to drink whiskey in coffee and smoke cigarettes on my sunny balcony and talk poetry and novels and science fiction and the internet. i want to get blazingly stoned and lie on the floor listening to the wavering drone in a radiohead song, fingers held gently and tremblingly newly, flickering in time with the treble. i want to make out on the grass, under trees, mother nature in on it, smiling slyly with her coy rustlings and babblings at the rough lust contained in our young frames.

spring is nigh - here, even, i walk home in bare legs and 26th is snowy with cherry petals - and i am afire with directionless want. autumn has a dear, cosy longing, but spring and its raw ecstasy of deliverance as flowers and leaves coax themselves into slipping open then bursting into wild blossom, as sunshine leaves a liquid trail of heat down the backs of your thighs and you suddenly transition to wearing as little clothing as possible, damn the goosebumps on chilled, tender white skin when your attire proves slightly seasonally inappropriate.

spring, you are so sweet, and you make me ache so.

rain is darkly sheeting outside

and its chill reflection in the large front

windows of my restaurant

reminds me of the radiation pooling

across the world.

i am afraid of such slow, eating poison;

moreso than car crashes, debt, loneliness, ruin,

earth, world, diet, blood of our being,

the space we inhabit we are ruining,

inevitably and inexorably.

i haven’t anything new to say about dying sea life, ruined kelp, radiation burns.

as a child i cried over jagged tree stumps on a favorite trail, and i feel

the same wail now, building

in shame and outrage, and terrible,

thwarted inheritance.