River

Black in its translucence, contorting my image, I wondered how one could view their life through ripples. I enjoy the unassuming nature of people simple in their desires that wear the river on their backs, on their smiles. Mesmerized by the clusters of rotting leaves that stick to your palm on the underside of low branches stretched so you could walk a mile without ever touching the ground. I have seen you tree shaken and tossed like an insatiable actor under clouds low and hairy. Much like this tree has seen me swept and lost. I feel ever so confined, ensnared by living water. The past was now a souvenir. They found me face down in a bed of shells with mud in my ears, and water moccasins tangled about my pale neck resembling an intricate sash dotted with blue crystals. A gaggle of fly fisherman in-between bating hooks were the first to notice glinting teeth caught in a web of algae and the slumped wedge of a milky shoulder blade poking just above the cover of red chokeberry. I’m told a family of frogs eagerly trapezed along the ridges of my corpse with no scorpions in sight. I don’t blame those poor boys shamed by the skeletons beneath the skin of the countryside, but I can’t help but detest their picnic basket of discarded corks and cheeks plump as the moon and red like autumn. Who were they to endeavor the task of delivering a bill of death, with their eyes still glazed over from summer’s honey. I’d have more appreciation for some old dog-hearted laggard like my father who spat out misfortune without so much as a cough. Though I suppose I couldn’t have been so lucky. Truthfully my father was lucky, unfathomably so lucky to have a son that had the compulsion to make something beautiful that it drove him to absolute confidence that this reality was no longer needed. I’m assigning words to things I don’t understand, afraid of what happens when something becomes worn and aged. I habitually lived with the elements but knew little more of the land. I lay there for nearly a week according to the poor racket of my bones shivering and expressing life free from servitude towards my ever-wakening demands. I've always been a nagging day dreamer my fixations are a catalyst towards stripping any necessity for momentary relief of primal emotions. I spent my whole life in a limbo of wondering how knowing “you” would better my time spent here, how the responsibility for just scraping the crumbs of a stalemating imagination was yours alone. The problem with day dreaming is that I'll always be waiting to ruin someone’s all too happy expectations for themselves. I'm slow like honey and sweet to the touch but I wish my thoughts were as peaceful as the scene laid before "you".