Welcome To Possum Hill
Land of Poetry
Today's Feature:
"Eating Garbage" By Richard Smiraldi
Where is it that you begin,
when the train has abandoned you;
waiting on a lonely platform counting seconds like they were ants sprawling
down, down, down into the tracks?
Are the miles of separation cleft
into the sinews of your heart?
The promise of a storm; thunder is not far behind.
I was a gray china coffee cup. I was a saucer with a crack in its side. I was a virgin who died.
But I never was you. I never was anywhere you.
I couldn't beat the sun into oblivion. I wouldn't swallow up the ocean and vomit out the dead.
And I have never crunched a single star.
What would happen, I wonder, if I became like the dust on top of a bookshelf; a crushed soda bottle- too mangled for redemption; a footprint in an evergreen forest, or the glue behind a postage stamp?
Isn't that what you wanted?
Perhaps I tried to be that last morsel of cake gone stale; that drop of cologne untouchable and destined to evaporate into nothing; or an already opened airplane towlette.
But I woke up when you called me stupid in a room full of your friends,...
strangers to me.
You whispered dirt with your flaggelating tongue. You tread on and killed my love.
So I had to become the train and run you down, traveling brilliantly forward,
leaving what is there,
when there is nothing,
behind.
You can not turn around anymore and look at me. You are a shadow; exhaust; a faded echo; a rubber tire shred on the shoulder of some unknown and forgotten highway.
I will never again step backward for anyone, man, woman or you.
Something didn't go wrong.
It was always wrong.
I've been eating garbage
too far long.