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Saturday, June 30, 2012

Adventures in Roadtrips

So.

Piedmont Slam (minus Kross and E, plus iShine and Mel) are heading to DC for the Beltway slam, which is a good time, but is full of inside jokes I'm not really privy to. And so, instead of feeling lame the entire trip, I pulled out the notebook and crafted this little ditty. No title yet, but I think its more or less finished. Enjoy.

Before my brother or I
were ideas in candlelight
my family folded into eastern Kentucky
like a 20 dollar bill in your first money clip
that will not go emerald at its edges
The photographs themselves are storybook enough
for a bedtime story or a history class
and the couch from these days sits in our garage
like a relic from earlier times
And something about the tattered and thin
still feels like home
Like the view from I-64 at sunrise years later on a mission to shed your skin
in the arms of a lover who curves your body like a swan dive into still water
Home
is the first swell of oxygen
in a body blue-blooded to the tips of its fingers
and the cold in its touch
reminding you sometimes
away is the only direction
In Kentucky
is the only poet I know who is ever more honest than me
along with a broken heart
The tattered and thin of its atria
just a few beats away from arrest
and I have stopped willing myself not to miss you
I see home in the smiles of our photographs
like a romance novel I've not finished yet
And they are still doing construction on I-64
There was a rock slide after our last goodbye
It put something solid on the fissure in my heart
And this is how we never love the same way twice
Not like skipping stones on the smooth of a river
Or curling yourself into a favored chair
Not like thumbprint pressed to the edges of a fading photo
Not like this
Not like home
--

Peace Be

1 comment:

  1. Reading this was like trying to taste the salty bay air of Hampton Roads and not miss all the people it connected me to. I could see the shore line and smell the rankness of the paper mill that lets me know there's not much longer till I can see the faces that poured into me what my two years of teaching has not. I'm pretty sure this poem filled me with that fondness that is sometimes lost in the frequency of a routine too oversimplified to matter for nostalgia's sake but just for a second, this walk was a serene one, down a road less traveled by in my postgraduate years. Thanks for the trip. Now I want to go Home.

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