Framingham
       

Farms reticent enough
that they back away
from the road,
antonyms

to some dream.
In the walls, having
been disfigured,
you think you see

glue-colored
spiders. Nothingness has a
fertile odor. You
can't trust yourself

to understand its
ways. Brazenly
you search online for
another

person's rendition
of the farm. Photographs
of gouged clapboard.
Outside you

hear an honest-to-god
weather-vane. Now
you're giving them
away.

My friends
are like a war I fought in.
Our collective past is
what I have. Outside,

the pull-shade of landscape
rolls away, and I'm
throwing faces at it. They've
never set foot here.

The next day, faded
thoughts on me
like a commencement gown.
I sit at the computer again.

It is wind. It is hyenas
and thorns. I keep going back
to when I first
fashioned each

crude animal. If they
are of my making,
who will
make them stay?

Tweet
Copyright © 2016 Darin Ciccotelli All rights reserved
from West Branch
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission