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Breezie Chrisman Poem
I’m left perplexed. How vexing, how complex…
the plight of a simple man, (one’s ruin is another’s choosing) is moving and doing the least that he can, no oil changes no wedding band.
All this just to exist, just to be standing, still living, surviving this life with a pocket knife and all the time that most never venture to find before the last goodbye.
Like the return of high tide you can count on his nothing, nothing to show nothing to hide... a cowboy trailblazing the countryside.
Beethoven's eleventh symphony ?keeps the beat of this visceral epiphany.?
No piano key in record history? could serenade away the blue music that drips from the riffs in me.
How is it to be, so utterly free. No paper trail to keep folded neatly, a homeless nomadic home body taking what the rest of us are wasting, catching sickness digging ditches while we dine on delicious richness.
My intuition becomes twisted and misses the simpleness where my wisdom depicted the abyss, this before my vision was transformed by barely bearing witness to his existence.
Copyright © Breezie Chrisman | Year Posted 2014
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Breezie Chrisman Poem
Cracked beer bottles and detached baby rattles in slightly untidy, black plastic wrappers.
No garbage can nor box or bag is exempt from the burrower’s thorough ransack.
Rancid rubbish, rich with unwanted tidbits,
And the bounty - immeasurable, infinite,
Relished like a relic, coddled like a child,
Winding and wild, like the Nile for miles.
The moon beams.
The clicks of the crickets and me
Listen closely to the loneliness approaching.
The wheels on that ghostly grocery cart hit a high note
When they collide in the dark with a pothole.
Impurities between your feet and the street,
A concrete imposter, potential disaster.
A botched blacktop bandage, an imbalanced disadvantage,
Where what's together comes apart, and dignifies the damage.
He and his one cart army at first alarm me,
but the creaking steel sings to me like remembering... my childhood chain-link tire swing.
It’s a memory worth more to me than a dozen dazzling diamond rings,
But I can see that this nomad, or so it seems,
Knows these kinds of secret things.
This man hears the singing too, I think.
He is King of No Man’s land, from the cracks in the cobblestone, to the coins in the sand, he's burned bridges on the mississippi and pissed into the rio grande
The secret keeper of stoplights and bar fights and side streets at twilight,
He never looks back but he's haunted by his hindsight
He’s not the type to invest his trust in much, or rely on luck; he defies deep rivers and digs through ruts. His greatest love is a homemade lunch.
His sights are narrow, eyes on the blue barrel with the three painted arrows,
Always coming back like a brave baby sparrow
Reluctant to relent and as unlikely to repent,
Isolated existence created a livelihood exempt
his prayer is a cardboard sign and his church is a tent.
We imagine his message says less than he meant.
His misshapen heart bent by liquor store lament
The drink did its best and the dope took the rest
Already been twice over again re-mended; just a needle and thread weaves two times through his neck, the only reason he's not three times as dead.
His welded shut blood vessels hustle for fixes, like a fox he has tricks for his misguided mission,
The quickest flip is to switch his addiction, suspend its vicious, loaded affliction
He's given up on forgiveness and no kind of Christian
I watch from my spot and get lost in this image
Copyright © Breezie Chrisman | Year Posted 2014
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Details |
Breezie Chrisman Poem
Cold nights and tree lights taught him to forget home.
He’s mellow tonight though, no telling what goes unknown.
He packs light and steps heavy and taps his fading flashlight and I bet he’s a lefty.
Duracell down spiral connects with flesh on even time, a metronome of alkaline.
Ill forever remember this snowless December and he’ll certainly forget me.
Still I sway with the music still he keeps it rock steady.
As he rolls down my street and through the night (like I roll through my week)
All that exists is the moon, that man… and me.
Ain’t it somethin’, what life brings when you start listenin’ to the quiet things?
Plastic sacks like gift-wrap, thrice reused, revalued glass
Rides passenger beside wrinkled paper grocery bags
Holding sugar coated soda cans,
Hanging from the rubber handle and his hands were full of gravel.
They grow more fragile as he travels.
And this overanalyzed poet’s delight
Does just that just as the moon tells of midnight.
The crude acoustic music moved right through the tulips, ricocheted off red bricks, treble clefs start riots.
It jukes a tune, almost a salute, not unlike the Lousiana blues, up your spine it always winds up finding the light that burns inside, even from somewhere deep in the bayou at suppertime.
A profound lyric, when you hear it slides the skin from your bones and you fall to the dirt, like ivory stones.
He's hard to get a good look at, and feared like a black alley cat;
his con-man disappearing act is long like the years you cant get back.
The words that i don’t hear his lips say are shouted aloud by his ribcage.
The nickels he bent over backwarrds fo never got easy to take.
This slow going rolling stone grew old with his folded up road map
the only thing that he had when the rain was too bad.
This landed him on a fortunate sweet spot,
an unfound tin can jackpot in the same spot you hadnt yet thought,
the start of the last stop of the things we bought and dinners we got.
His belly goes empty when everything rots.
Copyright © Breezie Chrisman | Year Posted 2014
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