1. i am where i usually am. i’m seeking something but i don’t know what. it’s always something. when i find it i’ll know it. i’m in the rockshelter, waiting for it to exhale. he licks his lips and doesn’t spit me out. i come here all the time; i come here when i’m good and not so good, and each visit i leave a little bit of me. i leave things like heartbreaks with bad boyfriends and flat tires. i pour out a beer sometimes and leave big shining apples. once loose tobacco sprinkled in with dead flowers. i ask the shelter what he wants from me. i say to him, “i don’t believe in compromise but i’m down to sacrifice.” he never asks for much. the rockshelter whispers something back, but i don’t understand.
2. & 3. i ask him to repeat himself. my 28th year slips out of me from underneath my feet, swimming up the limestone shelves. i lean closer and it recedes. i step away and it grows & heaves. “i never met a morning i didn’t like,” the rockshelter whispers, “and america will always let you down.”
4. the 28th year and the rockshelter’s walls play together, reunited, harmony in the patterns across the shelter. now with one less year ahead or behind (who can really tell which is which), i hear the 28th year yell as it whirls around the walls, “remember what coyote said! ‘no sweeter sight than lookin back!’”
5. the rockshelter breathes in with me. i’ve been here before. recalling that the days are the most precious resource of all, i ask both the 28th year and the rockshelter how sparingly i should use them. “how should i ration myself?”i ask them. we’re in the desert afterall. there’s a long, slow exhale following my question out of the shelter’s mouth. the wind is warm as hits the teeth of the rockshelter upon its exit. there’s no more whirling of the shadows of the 28th year or warmth left from the shelter respiration or a one-liner that follows that long drawn exhale to get me through it.
6. hearthheartheatheap. words fall out of me. i’m the heap.
7.& 8. it’s a sweetest sadness not finding what you’re looking for; sometimes it means you get to keep on going. i’m in the car while old country songs play, “i’ll never get out of this world alive” & “there’s a tear in my beer.” the rockshelter will outlive all of this, and i wear out my favorite songs until they lose all their meaning.
thinking about & thanks to Mathias Svalina for the prompt, Hank Williams Jr. & Sr. (Kevin Morby & Jim James too), the extinct mesozoic seas of West Texas, & my 28th year.
1. Write your way into the life you lost in the cave.
2. Lick a voice from the shadows on the wall.
3. Want in revision, how America burns dawn’s faith.
4. Misery is fascinating in its technique.
5. Suffering is a prosody of urge.
6. Syllables will slip from your lips like a green river.
7. When it happens, you’ll feel it happen.
8. When it happens the cave will quiver.