1
Pain radiates
through smoothly shaven flesh,
Unseen skull
in burning wrapping paper,
I skitter to share
what it seeks to prevent…
The years are a bitch
and I ache to betray her…
For words in this gloaming
are enabled by night…
Even when tinged
with the heartbreak of sorrow…
Thoughts freely roaming
until morning sight…
Might seem unhinged
come the light of tomorrow.
2
There was a morning, a day, a hot afternoon
where I thought my life would change…
where my wandering
had finally altered my direction…
but it wasn’t meant to be.
Perhaps every day is like this for others…
but the day I am thinking of,
the day of sex before the sermon,
I believed that I’d finally arrived
somewhere I was meant to be,
only to learn across the years
that I would seldom ever return,
and I wish I would have known
how special that time was,
how precious those moments.
It’s altogether different
yet somehow the same
when watching you
watching whales…
when the music you share
nearly kills me with it’s mournful beauty –
giving me fever chills and death spasms
before my fever breaks
and I’m allowed to dance
in the trance of our shoegazing
dream pop.
In the fever
all that could comfort me
was the seemingly old
but younger woman
with the ghost on the porch…
An echo of that first reading
joining my pain across two different eras.
3
The first would have been discovery,
and on the very brink of puberty
as I stumbled through that sea of trees
to find a validating fiction.
And now the feeling: brotherly,
yet still cherry stink of nudity
as I’m humbled by our deities
to bind an animated friction.
And the proof
it is not fair
but the truth
is he’s out there
begging for money,
trading sex for drugs hungry
while the whales circle round us
tasting sweetly table scraps.
And the lie
if there is one
is that life
is a shotgun
because life hasn’t drowned us
baby please don’t go like that.
Written by Jason Wright
April 19, 2018
For Sean (Mobley) and Steve and Anthony.
