Hollow, Stump, Hidden, Still

My letters you’ve known, you’ve known me, jagged, jetties, my letters always killed, you’ve known me - whether typewritten prose or stumped utterances drug over with a knife - it’s overdue, expectant, it’s unwritten, for you, to you, and I know it, and I’m sorry but I’m buried, I’m a hollow, hidden moonshine still and I’m silent.

You’ve known me, picture blue tarp tailgate pools, me, pitting peaches and spitting in the pastor’s pulpit carpet, me, preaching blasphemy and branding nonsense for sale - if only to swallow the largest-mouth fish whole.

I orchestrate, I detest, I never digest, I break the sharpest rib bones, splinter casks, wear an oak barrel as a dress, I do not impress, I incandesce, Indian-give tight gripped pithy church plate offerings, and I’m sorry still - but a crow has no covey and no good excuse to go back and float, to count the cattails.

And I can only be sorry now, uncertainly sure how to drown for you, set lousy with these words I’ve so often sounded out, and no, I can’t, no, it’s familiar and shrill, like a saw-blade slipping knots not meant for a paper mill, so now don’t waste your bird shot.

Nothing about me is what I believe you’ve dreamed, such a severe inelegant preen, no naturalist’s photograph, no time to kill, no moment to capture a still-life in oil, no postage stamps to send or sell, no Audubon-sponsored award winning imagery, and that’s what I mean - no number of easel-barring arm-tucked avian enthusiasts could carry enough duct tape to fix what’s broken in me, I mark the most underserved.

You knew me, know me, I’m moccasin-mouthed, thick and black scaled, slither fireside beside screaming cicada creeks, they keep the loneliest of my secrets - cypress swimmers in blistered water, but maybe I like it that way, bent and unsound, stirred yet stagnant - you should not search for a drink, and please, please, unceremoniously wish, to forget me.

Delivery, letters, I meant it, for a moment that mattered, sat a spell, brick cracked husked pecans as they fell, too hardened myself to spit out the bitter brown shell, yelled some promises over the swamp, swelled, wished I was your nested house finch - loyal, content, not directionless, but I’m not, I’m honeycombed hornets, passenger pigeon mercenaries - honest extinctions of all my hired help, dusty flight feathers, framed, and I cannot perform, and it’s heavy, I know, it’s that lead shot, snow globe,straw-stuffed, it’s glass-cased cadavers, numbered curates on tiger oak shelves, admired, almost caught, but not.

Genuinely eastbound sometime to you, maybe last month, cut my tongue, intentions spine-spelled and I wanted to be bookend bound, a forever collection of sorts, a glazed set of salt and pepper ceramic spice shakers, thinking I could handle something delicately, for once, but I would not, my hands - arthritic, anesthetized, paralytic, rigid, I admit it, and still I cannot explain myself.

A sorry ass I guess, at best, unyoked, unworthy, untethered, a danger, a graying donkey, hunched, diabetic, listless, drunk, lowing on the railroad tracks, copper-crowned, a busted cedar truck, begging to be hit head-on or fed, lazy gaze, inoperable and unwound, a single lobe prohibitory liver, scar-tissue, a jake-leg deception, maybe thumbed, a sweet tasting poison in a hollow, hollow stump, a temperance movement, a snare drum hit with a dull hatchet, a temporary head thump.

I’d swallow, I swear, if I could, I would, if I could, I swear.