Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Long Pork on the Hoof

The smell of broken skin and
old blood breeds and becomes
cousin to all other scents, until
it is on your hands, hanging
thick in new-washed shirts from
the dryer, inside the chips
you open to go along with your
sandwich at noon, those chips
you close your eyes and eat
nonetheless, though there's that
indelible image of hunching
down over the stolen meat
of a half-alive sibling in the
darkened cave of the lower
mind—you eat of the flesh
of your own kind at lunch,
and the unwholesome stench
of it never goes away, even
when hands are washed clean
and dried on white towels.

You see blood smiling from
the wounds that take so long
to close, healing their depth
and width so very slowly,
and you swallow down on
it and continue, making it
normal, making it okay.

You nod when the bleeding
is less, when the strange
clear flow of liquid that isn't
blood or anything else you
know the proper word for
hasn't built up and soaked
through the bandages,
normalizing those knife-made
mouths in the flesh of your
kind, thinking about those
grateful sensations you never
know to have until the simple
revoking of some heavy
weight sounds like heaven's
redemption.

You make much of small
progress and train yourself
not to breathe, not to think of
the fact that, under the clothes
and skin, we are just meat,
quick to injure and slow to heal,
just long pork on the hoof.

2 comments:

Risu said...

After a long day a nothingness and simultaneous everythingness, it is a pleasure to discover that you have posted another delightfully twisted poem.

Patrick M. Tracy said...

Braleigh,

I aspire to nothingness and simultaneous everythingness, yet never quite attain them, and here I go rescuing you from them with twisted poems.

Oh, unhappy day and sad tidings!
Let the beatings begin!

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