Them That Know

You shed your silken
expectations
& stumble through whirlpools
of cigarette butts & barbed wire
inside your buried fingerprints

It’s as easy as the cruelest month
frying hubcaps
when all I wanted was a glass of water
& the reassurance of a
rent free grave

to be taken in by that dark flowing
nada (the ruins of breath & the ransom
bleached black by the rigors of
what the ancients called
the leadpipe tango)

When you finally come to
your bronze eyes are hooked on wavering
pillars in the kelp forest & the green
sledgehammer light that filters down
to the ocean floor