55

I can feel my mind unravel when I Go Home


unravel towards a longing to experience
the world as a blanket,
bloom into sleeping things that twist towards
an ancient lulling,

like there is nothing I want more than to be
stuffed into the toy box that is a small plastic football
by a hurt sibling, like I

•    want the sibling to sit on top of the toy box
•    want there to be no mutual understanding that the sibling will move from the top to let me out

like the old days,
when love was acute and we were always capable
of fake murders, I

•    want to sleep for a long time in the plastic football, its former bones scattered on the floor all around my silent shell, glowing in the good sleep, safely enrobed in the imitation-pig skin plastic

we can never go back to the football toy box in a satisfactory way,
in a way that playfully challenges our faith in our immediate survival

and we never recover the lulling

we look for it in the perfect necks of the people
who decorate our bodies
with their own, when we are lucky enough
to host a fleeting ornament

to permanently host an ornament is to be able to cope with a year-round Christmas

I am the last haunted idiot to want to cope with a Christmas that dies when I die,
and a very specific sort of idiot in that

•    I want the coping to retain some quiet enthusiasm
•    I want the coping to resemble some mature romanticism
•    I want to be the aging Christmas of another idiot
•    I want to be someone’s favorite neck in the crowd
•    I want to carve his laugh lines in the winter
•    like he was a pumpkin in the fall
•    I want our reflections to seem intentional

and when the rain lays down on the earth

•    I want to feel its intention

in the company of his neck