Category: Poetry

This is my knee
It creaks
when it bends
like the old willow tree
at the house
we lived in
when we kids

Grey snow in the air
and the wind that spins

around and up and through
skeletons of what was,

silhouettes that crumble
and disappear.

I am old and fat and slow.

Even the breath leaving this body is stale,
leached of life by its torturous climb
from the flesh cavity of my chest,
up the worn trachea,
and into a mouth clinging to its teeth
like a shipwrecked sailor to driftwood.

I started with
the basic summary—
one wife, two jobs, no kids—
then added chapters to detail
the paths taken
since we last spoke,
but soon realized
I was boring even myself.

When you were five
and so small you were
almost lost in your own jacket—

a bundle of bones
and two eyes so blue
they drowned out the summer sky—

you would recoil
from every loud noise on
the nearby street,

I left for work this morning
but never came home.

The man they sent in my place was older,
weaker. He had a scar across his left
cheek and gray splotches in his hair.

Last night, I dreamed
that you were tossing back highballs
from a martini glass,
and when I pointed this out,
you slapped me,
and said everyone was doing it.

When I struggle to fall asleep,
I’ll count white hairs instead of sheep,
as there are more of them each day.

(How many more? I cannot say,
for when my counting climbs past ten…

What I see
is given form
by light,

refracting,
reflecting,
translating mass
into shape
and colors
and faces,

but in the darkness…

My words begin to die
the moment I set them free,

tumbling from chapped lips like
broken acrobats;

the carpet is thick with their
skeletal remains…