pioneertown.

Recovery

I thought I shouldn’t listen to the incessant demands of my body.
I thought my hunger was the hollow sky I was in love with. I wanted to feel
my hip bones like their own perfect story
glowing of my brilliant control. I wanted to close my teeth
on my continuing discomfort, uncurl into a ghost that wandered out of myself and into whatever
else was comfortable in the dust like more dust in a column of dusty light
coming down on me in a mindless grimy sunset.

I was caught in its ridiculous hands, alive only in its fingers. I’m talking about denial
so complete, its loss became an unplaceable thing inside me. An unknowable vessel.
A fifty-pound block of my own beefed-up pain, fat and ripe like a dead
horse’s thick, sun crusted meat. Everything moved

ahead in small unequal pieces and outward in every direction. And although there was nothing
left for me to see, I kept seeing all that was not actually there: what I’d always had becoming
the thing I’d lost slowly repeating on the ground next to me, again.

And the stranger I saw looking back through the mirror was a child who could barely
speak, whose face was covered in brambles, and not just covered, tangled over and through
unable, at last, to pretend there was anything else happening.