One of many, many poems I wrote contrasting Lower Alabama to a semi-mythical experience of my own self. This one is a rare case of dealing with my tendency, in my early college days, of fairly constantly lying because I did not know who I was. A slide into social chameleon behavior resulted in me regularly just telling people what I thought they wanted to hear. Poor guy.
Time is the sweetest flower, blossoming decay.
(Entropy
Rose petals whither white and ashen,
A sound like waiting falls with them)
The years stretch out before
Rivers flow up and drain
Down somewhere 'round some Pensacola
A young me [in memory, off color, stained
Like a photograph left too long in
Cigarette smoke] waits for this day to come
, Not knowing any better,
He lies about whom he is
And whom he hurt
And fails to goodbye at
Appropriate times
And all the times he is
Fall, too, whither white and ashen
Into the sand where the lost
Days burn out in their own glare,
Until all of him is lost in the act
Of finding. There, if anywhere.
If dears think of him, at all,
Them probably couldn't guess
His exact precision
And he rarely thinks of theirs
Deep in and thinking
And somewhere some Mobile, AL is muggy
Old and that older
Younger me and that He is dead
And rivers flow
With catfish and barges and sandbars
Smoke and churn
All around him
And straight on through to now,
Meandering some,
A succession of who.
The beach knocks against the waves
And the breeze never stops, there
Next to the tee-shirt shop and beside
The open wall bar with teenage queen
Three fingers deep in a dream,
The holy-roller spittle specks
And shouts
Hot asphalt barely cooled from the summer
Heat
And it's another 8:15.
Mushrooms swell in the dirt disturbing
Leaves in the brown and red Spring
With the dripping sounds from newly leafless
Trees and a scent brings back
Memory