Rivers

I myself am terribly afraid of not getting what I want. I think I’ve conditioned myself over centuries, as one soul in particular, clawing my way out of one lover to the next in attempts to eventually receive it. Sometimes I can almost feel the people I have been in the past. Their presence scratches like fingernails under my skin, seeking her, searching and destroying everybody but the one they want. I cut people down at their knees, like an axe inside a luscious forest. The nests fall out and splatter on the rocks at my feet, often I can still see the speckled paint upon the eggshells. The mountains know the song I sing and try to stifle it with second winds and on occasion, a third. I yearn for the touch of someone I’m not sure of yet, an unknown passerby, someone already picked out for my fingers. A puzzle piece that doesn’t fit is what I find most often, even after breaking off parts and pieces in succession at an attempt to make it work. The colors never line up and the pictures that we make are made of limbs from people that don’t go together. Like the figure of the horse made out of men chopped up and nailed to the barn. Like the books that don’t look right when set up on the shelf. I’m always trying to choose what looks good beside me, what feels right but they never do for long. My arms contort and shatter in the dreams that come my way, bending ever backwards toward a woman that seems to love to stay just out of line of sight. My legs buckle and I am forced forward, to the ground to worship footprints in the snow, to crawl through ice and mud and shit left from the elk on some interminable convoy. One of perpetual rage like a wooden wheel that melts all but the drift of flakes from high above, each one made in its own separate image. The flesh of my belly is chewed off bit by bit by stone and root and crevice. The bones that form my neck seem to be filled with sand or surrounded by it as I turn to drag the other cheek in my pursuit. I imagine that I leave a less than pleasant trail, one of dried blood and teeth and hair.

I myself am terrified to come across the spirit trapped inside a body I will not be sure of at first glance. I myself am mystified at the fact that such a journey may not end inside this lifetime. I myself am haunted by the thought that I press onward, into the next vessel, through a different pass and down through different valleys. Doomed to repeat the same steps that progress slowly to a squirm until the worms consume whoever I am next. Perhaps I’ve carved out the paths the rivers take in search of you.