Freckles

I myself am several things, fearful being one of them. My feet have yet to fail me. I’ve walked away from Mother, from Father, from Son and Daughter when it seemed the best thing I could do for them. I’ve walked and walked and spent a night or two inside a bottle, every week, in every month, for every year since seventeen. From shoes to boots, from streets to Hindus I have traveled. From clean white sneakers to the blood of soldiers, the blood you cannot scrub out of your soul. I’ve walked through borders down in Mexico, at night in deserts with a rifle. This life I’ve lived is little more than movement, little more than spruce and pine and loose leaf tea when coffee wasn’t readily available. I’m capable of leaving now. Of walking out on my own story, even when the man that stays out in the dunes says that I cannot. I’ve walked and ran and kept a pace that some would say seemed graceful in its truth. A pace that keeps me tucked away from hands that may or may not hold me still. I do not want to run. I don’t know why I do it. I know I do it when it feels like second winds and the second that I’m off I’m right back where I started once again. In circles, big or small, in circles, to the point that bone and pavement sleep in matrimony. A slave to my own second guessings, for nothing here on earth is ever evident enough for me. There’s questions I can’t answer, there’s possibilities that feel like acid on my brow and flaccid now my hands they ache. They ache to pick up laces in their grasp and for whichever set of fresh belongings I have gathered in this period of time. Sometimes it’s just a handful of complaints and sneers and jeers and rage. Sometimes it’s death and doom and placid people I am due to suffer through. I walk to get away, I walk to be alone, I run when things feel out of place and nothings set in stone. My heart bleeds through the fabric of reality and shirt alike, I burn the bridges when there’s no one left to fight. Nobody fights for me so feet find bike or feet find flight and feet find me outside at night. I walk and walk and walk. These lovers that I lay with pray for things to matter to me but they don’t and I won’t lie to save a bit of face or faith. My creator pulled me from the mud and muck and handed me machinegun, pointed to the path and pleads with me to listen closely to the sound of man. To sound out what it meant to be a man, whenever I might reach the top. Yet there’s never one to come across, no end in sight or common clause. The when, the why, the who are always up to be debated on.

Yet when I came upon this little thing, of freckles, a body like a temple and a voice like Spring I looked down at my feet. I begged them to be still and still they kept themselves for but a moment. I awoke, as if from out a dream and dreams that lasted like eternities. She pulls at me and sends her hands out in a search, not to destroy but to command my own. Adversaries so it seems, her limbs and mine, almost always tied up in each other, squeezing, so close to being free of one another yet totally combined. Fused to her I find the self, while looking down from up inside the trees. My body bends about the branches, I can feel the leaves and bugs and birds confined out of a fear for this intruder. I am not meant to float and yet I do, tied and tethered to her finger. A shoe that dangles, a foot that screams out in terror at the thought of losing it. But my gaze fixated on the shape of breast and neck and wrist and ankles. I think of her subdued and tender in my grasp. I think of her tied up tightly, lips glossed, eyes glazed over, cheeks reddened by the sheets, embedded in a moment with myself. To see these things before I have them feels like cocoa on a wrap around porch, like lightning bugs and thunderstorms and sticking my toes into the sand. Like staying for a bit. Like finding home, like lying still, like this is what love is.