Road to Dystrophic

By Learned Irvine
I lost my soul to empty sweat
With a short look and a tin ear
My tresses thinned by time and blood
I turn older
And starts my spirit to molding

To deceive and ripen a sour age
To regret plucking
The low-hanging fruit too early
And now what's left
Too high to harvest

Suddenly a desert road
A moon-gray stretch flanked by Mars tones
Under a glaring sun and infinite sky
The short sharp bleats of tires straining to hold the road, stop-
A van weaves and takes violently to the scrub, stop-
The angles of human existence,
stop-
And the rounder contours of nature,
stop-
Meet,
stop-
Dust doesn’t settle,
Instead, a liberated puff hangs a moment
Then tilts at the air in search of better quarters

A tangled tan van, births a man,
With non-working legs
Wages of an accident long passed
Crawling around the burning wreckage,
Trying to save his similarly hobbled friend.
Misunderstood, then taken away
In a fit of misunderstanding

He thinks of spiders on strings that bounce
From electrical wires
Strung over the driveway of his thicker days

As we join the show in progress
Self esteem earnestly ebbs
Sense of power peters
Confidence cuts a rocky retreat
When man starts brushing
The limits of his talent
Caressing
The limits of his talent
Straining
The limits of his talent

With a world-beater heart
Lodged deep within
Aging packets of soft tissue
Lashed to the bones of a bruised hull
I attack the world with a light, white feather
A downy touch where a ball-peen is better used
I save the flinty strike
For the organs within
And make my world-beater world-weary