Tar-Baby

Sobering up after a five year drunk on your delusions, the blackest of blackberries pressed with no care for seeds, my crooked smile littered with these.

As you slowly inched the Black Lake trail, taking me to a place you no doubt thought would evoke the spirit of our once lying our heads down softly on the dirt some years before to watch the light glitter its way off from the trees and into one another’s eyes, the effervesces promising after another starved spot we’d endured due to your deep-down viscous oils—the barrels of killing agent you’ll beer-bong up to any lost and wandering woman you come upon.

Unaware of the portal shifts in woods where the elves and fauns steal away souls to live out cold lives of servitude, barefoot on mud and pressed, rotting leaves. Well, it was there on that trail that I avoided your remarks like a sign you held, DANGER AHEAD and Detour for Sure!

Oregon grape and its purple, poisonous berries and you’d said that you’d liked the ring of it. You, limping, ACE bandaged leg, had called the next day off from work. I noticed your foot had completely slipped from the collapsed sole of your LA boots—the ones you refuse to throw.

You brag about how your face remained young because on all of those halo-torn, glorious, southern California days, you’d been sitting in the dark, cold, air-pumped editing bay at Playboy, converting from VHS to digital, fifty thousand, plus five sword-moments of women being pulled, yanked, tugged, entered and ejected and once numerical and processed, tossed behind into giant, rolling hazardous waste tubs to be wheeled away and buried in Utah’s ever-expanding landfills—right alongside MX missiles and Handford’s nuclear waste.

You dared call yourself an artist!

Bragged some more about having known a friend of Charlie and how to pick out Manson girls, you said I would have made the list for sure! I one of Utah’s most precious crop, ran home crying, loathed that whoever DJ who had played Angel in the Centerfold at the church dance when I had had to talk to my bishop about masturbation in order to secure a dance-card, a steep price for entrance.

My own dress, required knee-length was also long-sleeved with a pink ribbon high around the neck and white-eyelet laced edges, I matched the wallpaper in my private girls’ room.

But that room to undress, in under no one’s peering eyes, wasn’t enough to keep my well-liked blonde, sweater-vest wearing elementary school teacher from holding me in for recess, his school-room-pet for the year before coldly saying he no longer loved me fifth grade year.

How we’d met at a poetry reading was surreal, you in the very same failing souled shoes, eyes as black-brown and intense as ever a white man gets.

I thought you’d seen the errors of your ways, so many cheap ass views because you seemed to want me so much, yet you kissed her to ruin us, to punish me and when I’d asked WHY, you said because you wanted to, stood up a little taller with your infuriating response. For a year now, she posts your grime and slime, my name peppered and tacked, drying jerky, which now becomes a formal investigation.

Yet, I still agreed to meet you, this string of unresolved between us and you blind to night-driving, push the petal over the bridge in order to dump me off when I ask WHY again. Why can’t you talk about Mary and the situation? Again, you say that you don’t want to, and I say, that I can’t hold it all, say goodbye again.

Do anything, but throw me back, to the blackberry briar!

Source: Wes H.

Photo Credit: Eric Muhr/unsplash