Where All Rainbows End

reflecting on your own emptiness.

I'm here, where all rainbows end.

I'm in the place where the songbirds go mute.

Beyond the place in the road where deer are stunned by headlights.

Out in Death Country,

          the lasso got tangled 'round my neck.

Sitting on the half-rotted porch of a trailer

where I used to live,

where people used to stop by, drink, smoke, laugh, argue,

                and hurt each other.

A long time ago, when I lived with a different woman. And didn't love her.

The burdock grows high here beside the steps,

offering up the little bulbs of thorns, for sympathy.

They're a co-dependant plant, desiring to attach

those velcro clusters

      to my jeans and socks and sleeves,

      the back of my shirt.

The wind still blows empty here,

    like all the horrible volumes of some invisible ocean

    cascading through the trees out back.

I lay on my back against the broken sun-bleached boards

and stare into the dial-tone of hopeless, empty blue

                          above,

        my ashtray over my heart,

        its rim balanced like some translucent halo.

Smoking.

         And blowing it into the breeze.

My life dissipates.

My heart beats.

Bump. Bump.

Bump. Bump.

No     Work

No     Car

No     Cares

No     Love.

Bump.

Bump.

Should I rip out these old petrified bones from this porch?

And hammer together a guillotine?

Should I synch a noose,

      rasp it through the crotch of a tree?

It'll end up empty, swaying there for days---

      a reminder of dead, unfinished thoughts.

Should I go home, run a bath?

Shuffle though the envelopes packed in my mailbox,

    sentenced there by bill collectors.....?

The tin red flag has been up all week

    on my black mailbox of death.

Should I keep trying?

None of these, nor other questions, are answered

when I pick up and swish through the overgrowth around

         my old deserted porch.

The burdock swoons

and fixes its little minions to my pant legs,

clusters them around the tops of my socks.

Reviews

[Baby Ricochet]

Heavy. Really good dude

[Ees]

Ahh looking back when you've reached the other side of it. In a dark sort of way that I really like.
"Smoking.
And blowing it into the breeze.
My life dissipates."-
love that bit. I think of my life dissipating into the atmosphere as I blow out smoke from time to time.
I did a painting a few years ago that feels like it would compliment your poem here.
sometimes there are no answers.

[J. Viands]

It reminds me of Poe’s the haunted palace a universal feeling of loneliness most everyone can relate to at some point well done