Summer Peaches in the Orchard

*




As peaches split
From all over the orchard -
A 20-something, a new pretender, a beacon for the young and cheekboned
With boyfriend slick and hair coiffed slicker, fitter, faster, stronger,
Shit!
I think
He wears his whole life, a dolce, better!
Fuck.
Fuck!
The posey Fucker: each photo on his white and gleaming, polished space is
Perfect, shaded, artfully uploaded
Each moment perfect, each friend is vacuum packed, and each location
Heaven sent and god designed, the perfect, fucking perfect place
Each style is substance, each matter meaning, each smile and nuzzled kiss
Is genuine and breathing, each wit and wittitude beneath is instant, offhand and with such an attitude he must made for happiness and perfection and I am loosing
All perspective, right? All rhyme, all reason?
I am a little paranoid, a great long way deluded?


And then the other half of my twin soul steps up
With some kind of bent heptameter
And a rusted, crusted microphone.
The blanks, once yawning, are filled in:


The dust does grow a great blue edge to all that lies about
And the sickness, that strong preventer, ripping in and out
Tunnels further, deeper, under viscera and guts
To the snake that sleeps entwined – the one who eats and fucks
And with its sickly web its sicker pallor drew
About the serpent’s hot jewelled face a spell, a bluff, a blue.
The sickness fills each scale, each designated place,
With measurements of thinking bitter
Rotten, putrid and confusing, all along its hot jewelled face
And there, the snake, both tongues lie dormant, sleeps softly, slowly
As the wind and window play like lovers lost in cotton
I am destroying, slowly, softly, all the parts that look like day
While from snake’s hole like cold ink fingers poison, toxin and infection
Throttle rhyme and reason, throttle peace and understanding, throttle sex
And love and hope and make existence one great treason
Make healing sin and hard work ugly, lazy, and every step a waste,
And each time, each fucking time I try to fix it or to uncover
My mind and crotch and purple-painted solar plexus become an anxious paste
I am a waste, a sickness, a nervous wreck gone down in pieces, lost, a waste, a waste.
For what great beauty did I breach the dust filled air and leave my mother?
For an endless trail of life to suffer?
A tortured artist? I would rather be a poser and feel nothing in the summer.




Each half of soul has bit of bitter peach, as peaches split
Each happiness I see is but a monstrous thing, a fruit
with which no snake will tempt or tamper, yet
like Tantalus to sustainence, remains long out
of reach. Each leaf curls brown as does each root. In an orchard
fed with brine and spit,
I am the thing that rots
As peaches split.






*