Spring in PA

'Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.'

How proud muscle and bone are,
blood up and nose to the wind;
how proud in collapse to rebel
against the sun and raise the white flag
in sarcasm and growing fat like a cow.

Sun peeking thru grass, seek the yellow pulse
that binds daisies and violets; jimmy unending joy
from my gut where I walk
past streams that hide in plain sight,
by green ponds where geese sojourn,
under bridges the young have not
yet burned. Joy should be my name,
hammered out by the red crested bird
on hollow trunks near sacred stone.

Walk with me my friend; step with me
over mossed limbs. Go silently along mud banks
where the deer drink. Guide me past
the broken window where a star
once imploded on crypt house walls.

Be here my friend, by my side, bone of bone,
breath of my breath. Your words read me
closer than i know myself.

Find me inside these wrenched black gates
that a car has tried to ram through,
writing in this Spring park on a stump
with my chihuahua who's too timid to run
with the big dogs. Find me waiting, skin melting
from bone, ears failing to hear, tongue cloying
sweet words to seduce happiness.

You were there those debauched nights
when the drunken, drug-hazed car lamed me
along the tracks to a horizon with no returns.
That night I lost my glasses in the brown study.

Be with me now friend, though my bowels give out,
my eyes glaze gray, and fingers tremble
with a spoon of shriveled grain. It's your song
that once I heard it, the universe came clean
and peeled back this skin it wears.

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These sounds and face tonguing and toothing gritty
truths, make me look like a victim, free of fault.
I've dished as much shit as anyone and pulled pain
from life like a bad tooth torn from a sick mouth.

But her; why her dead so young and without blame,
that night her blood flowed from under the tires.
I will wait, friend, for as long as it takes, on
whatever desolate shore, whatever fiery night
to speak of this and hear you answer and say the holy name.

(c) Copyright 2012 Charles David Miller. All rights reserved.