It's Easier to Think

Ash has been falling on me for far too long. That is, I’ve been too long in the dark. I’ve been sucking up the ground and rearranging it in my mouth, running it through my teeth to filter out the dirt, taking with it the footsteps we have walked, the oceans we have swam - nothing escapes me in this state of critique. Nothing furnishes my mind the way sucking the ground does.

I stick to sidewalks when this happens. I cannot handle the velocity of the highways, the brutality of the streets, all that bruising and the way lights systematically disappear from you as you recline forward. I have been digested time and time again by my city. I am a completed chain of bile and chance.

I document what I know, not what I think - I have ridden that sort of arrogance from my self. I know what I have become and evolved from, and I know I am now an ashtray, dark with butts and tar like the grey streets I filter through my teeth every sheepish morning, a shallow pond of digested cinders.

“I roll joints on my poetry

because it gives it that extra kick

I’m looking for. It burns the herb

the way a flame can never,

licks it with the fiercest of adjectives

and tightens it up the way my bones

fill up my skin, from end to wet end.”

Interesting subject matter, no?

I wrote the subway train into a cave

low, beyond the tunnels of my toes

and I pushed for that canyon, a cry

of hail from my mouth, glass in the mist

on mountainsides, and the train

becoming red from my beak.

It’s hard to be a mountain goat.

It’s hard to give birth when

your world is tilted.