After that me and my good times
got evicted, eviscerated,
thrown from the moving car
tumbling into the ditch
meeting broken sticks and plastic bottles,
all ground into my face.
I sat up, body a broken beaver dam.
I dragged muscle and skin
to the top of the hill –
a dead goat of a body,
mind muddied with thirty years
of not wanting to make
a ripple in the pond.
And as another oblivion warship
hits sixty and transmutes blue into speed,
the only clouds in the sky
rip the sun form their stomachs
and blood pools down my face,
through the hair on my knees,
So I begin to pull the pieces of stick
from my arms, my face,
each blemish, each wooden mistake,
every stake that killed me.
I pull them out and hug them close,
holding each one like a phantom limb.