Loss

Recently I have lost a lot of things in my life. So it goes, as they say. But in light of this, Butchered Switch would like to present a poem that is, gasp, nostalgic? Remember though, nostalgia is false, and its flip side is bitterness.

LOSS

Nostalgia incredible.

That was a magic year.

Literally.

Magic.

Time was suspended. The silver

lining no one remembers,

or maybe the curse,

that now that it’s passed we are still there

still crossing those long spaces, making our small rooms.

In short, it withdrew, in fits and starts,

like the burps of a king reading proclamation.

The year, the magic, the place. Our palace,

torn down, condemned,

foundation filled with brack water

hidden in brush behind the grocery store.

What was it like?

Easier to try and relive last nights dream.

When I see the drunks, the whiz-kids,

the politicians,

When I smell this new concept,

mounted in panic,

of this as the irrational age,

the age where unreason is an invasive bloom,

I know it is nothing but dim scrambling,

backsliding into perversity

the desire to return

to that lost magic,

the age of ease and wonder

that now that it’s gone as if never happened

that now that it’s gone will never return.

The video footage is boggling,

but I don’t like to watch it.

I was there, I don’t need evidence.

Time was a feather,

suspended in a beer bottle.

With a cat in our lap we’d duck through the low door.

Looking back and talking, our head bangs the frame.

Falling to crush the cat

hiss becomes a cheep,

the cat bursts into many mice.

The welt raises into an egg.

We sit on,

nursing,

hidden,

wiping the blood off with spit.
Finally hatches,

the hatch finally opens,

the field buckles and curves,

a giant scarred hand clenches the dirt into a stone.

The dead beckon from the depth of their mist

through the portal.

The little baby hatchlings are so cute!

Fuzzy, running in circles.

Now we’re a family.

Everything was that way then,

totally wild,

when we had our magic.

Not fun all the time, not by any measure.

But in retrospect

more fun on a bad day then the best possible day now.

We sit dull, nothing to do, nothing happens,

throw a spoon in the air and it just falls on the table.

The machines do all the work, and the chemicals,

they are so eager, constructing developments

and strip malls on the head of a pin,

robotic gyrations in a simulation titty bar.

The first night of the month we relieve ourselves

of our gov’t dole.

Packing the house.

Sticking to plastic.

It is always hot, everyone is stupid.

I retreat from my world,

the possibility of the future presents me with nothing but ennui.

My voice gives out around noon,

I know I have cancer.

I know that I’m bitter

the taste of the magic continues to linger.

How can I love this world when I know I have left my palace.

My palace of magic, my deeds and my people?