The beard body: My Hideout Inn
A good writing weight is 10lbs hairier than what most consider attractive,
Or social.
And bored of this lean-to as well.
We drink beer from bottles chilled in the river,
lassoed at the neck, strung up like hooves of a hog-tied animal.
Our conversations get caught up in old circles,
till you draw a knife from my boot.
We cut off all our hair and swim,
handsome Don Juans, you fish
for mothers to love and let go of.
I run for the shrubs to shit,
find pelts of baby teeth for the 3rd straight day,
and decide again not to mention it.
I return to the river and scare the fish,
you look like the Future wading at the river head,
orchestrating giant rods in strange signals,
cast a looping hook into my lip and from the Future curse:
“motherfucker, you’ll never be a mother”,
and I begin to cry,
And lisp, I can’t pry the barb loose
so I ring it tighter around my lip and plunge below the surface.
Finally I spear a sock-eye in the stomach with a pocket knife.
Out of air, clip your line and tie a double-slip knot around the corkscrew and the
stuck fish, worked the hook from my lip and spit blood in the river
while you reeled in a winner
and said I was too drunk.
I yelled: “Brother don’t leave me!”
You yelled: “Don’t call me brother.”
I yelled: “Buddy done left”
It was true…you had.
When the moon rose in June I hardly recognized myself,
and it wasn’t the beers,
My face hadn’t been so naked in years, I could call out my reflection
the instant it lied,
I liked that. I remembered the day body wanted to be a priest,
the day body wanted to be governed
and the day body wanted to be free from all that.
I like liberation and thievery
and hate wide open spaces.
I recalled the day my father forgot who I was.
He remembered me the next time, a week or so later,
or rather he forgot that he’d forgotten,
just like that,
which made me knowing feel so much worse,
like that time I threw a knife at the sky
and it cut a rip like in fabric,
from beyond The Beyond orphan songs whispered and cried.
My brother and I had to made a pact: the habit of looking after this father guy.
When clouds had all but swallowed the moon bit I lassoed my waist to a stump
on the river bank and threw all my money at the shiny lures you left dancing on the
poles.
The current was running like the eyes of girls I wanted to chase,
I wanted to steal the jeweled stars sleeping in the river beds.
Twice you called: “get out of the river.”
Twice I remembered being a priest, remembered not being a priest,
Twice I found reasons not to get out of the river.
I mumbled into the last bottle of beer like it was the microphone
I used to communicate with myself.
That I had run out of money before I had run out of beer was my way of saying
I missed you
to me,
or my father,
or the heavy river running past my throat in general.
