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Monday, July 18, 2011

You Probably Don’t Remember Me, But I Died For You Once

The Mediterranean Sea obscures
on the horizon off the Amalfi
Coast of Italy, just the way
the bleak fields roll into oblivion
in southern Illinois—so no
place is as romantic as
we had hoped it might be.
No place could salvage us—
the mastermind and a fool like me.

The beach isn’t blonde—it’s
stones that break my feet.
Bruised and quiet I stagger
into the baby blue sea that
eats me—rolls my dismembered
form over the littered crests
of waves and sucks me
under only to beach me
again, over rocks, on my knees.
You roar with the sea—you
laugh and laugh and laugh
until I swear I see the red
in your eyes like an
over-exposed photograph.

Roll me over.  Roll me over.
Make me wait.
Swallow me in the wake.

I will drag all my broken bones,
poured into a burlap-skin-sack,
with these two fingers to the top
of the cliff above the town—
the quaint town with fishermen
and street merchants and little
Italian accordions that play
in the air around my feet—
I will scale over it all and
prick each finger and rain
down on you until your
eyes are gray and blind, like mine.

And in the darkness,
I will tell you how I craved
the nostalgia of your abuse—I have
cracked my ribs, as you broke them,
flung me against the pretty shore—
I have hanged, as you hanged me,
tangled and blue, from the
ancient vines that climb
these rock walls—among the purple
blossoms, sent on postcards to
all our friends back home.
You were my past and present, at once.
But, I am the future.  I am
the rogue wave of the collective
conscious and the upheaval
of it’s sentimental bedrock.

So, tell me again that I’m crazy—
tell me I’ll amount to nothing—
tell me you never lied—and
choke on these Italian waters when
you plunge headlong into the legacy
of the words I’ve yet to write.

I’m a locomotive, barreling into
human emotion on rotting railroad ties—
But, I’ll make headlines.