
"Bomb Shelter"
(Jay Morris)
I'll ask you if you think it's possible to love a bomb
shelter
You'll ask me why
I'll say it's because that's what I pretend to be
When I feel like the world is closing in on me
My meditative happy space
To meditate or medicate
That is the question
These hands are not my hands
These feet are not my feet
This heart is not my heart
They are the brick and mortar
I bought with my defense budget
This skin is not my skin
It's 7 inches of hard, cold obsidian
To fend off the inevitable irradiation of an erroneous
environment
You'll laugh at me because you think I'm making a joke about
my dick
I'll tell you not to interrupt my existential crisis
It's serious
It always will be
I'll tell you how some days
Every word said over me
And not to me
Whistles like the mouth of a warhead through the air
Terminal velocity until its detonation of impersonal
conversation
Around me
When other eyes register my perimeter and then quickly look
away
I feel like the landscape is splintered around me
The bombs go off in my vicinity
Barely missing me
Intentionally
Disguising this test of endurance
As a test of luck
I'll tell you how some nights
I can sit in a room full of people
And feel as desolate
as the aftermath of a nuclear fallout
The ruins of my city
Populated by the inevitable irradiation
This erroneous environment reeks
Of a macabre miasma
The smell of spoiled vintage
And silver aura radiating
Around the halos of skulls long in the tooth
No longer aged and wise
Just decomposing
As our vitality pretends we won't
As our mortality portends we do
I try to ward off the vapor
With the salts and silver smelted in
The enamel of my too short teeth
But they stay rooted in their canals
Guards of show, not of action
Wanting for hands to cover my mouth with
Wanting for feet to walk away
Wanting for a heart to pump life and color
To differentiate me from this silver haze
I have become a macabre monument
To edify this radiated ruin
Populated by you
Fluent in the language of light
Clairvoyant future demystifying the fog
I stood still in
You stand at my barricade
You look me in the eye
Then down at the weeds encroaching on my perimeter
In your presence, the weeds whisper flowers
Forget-me-nots if you’re romantic
Roses if you’re not
You rub your fingers gently along roughness of my rocky
walls
Spread your warmth on the coldness of my obsidian facade
Press your lips against my door
Reminding me of my mouth
And with it, newly formed I ask you
Do you think you can love a bomb shelter?
You say yes
I've even made it my home.
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