I have always missed you
I sat alone in a hot trailer
The New Mexico night wind
Popping the tin roof
I was drifting as a small animal
In a sea of sand
I have always cried for you
As a child does, I dreamed
Of soft warm paws holding me
I was afraid of god and hell
This was never supposed to be
Some psychological mire of dark truth
Never meant to be an occult moment
I was a boy, sick with grief
And lonely
I could not imagine the love
And so you became
In your many forms
Animal hand holder
I lie in the bed sweating and crying
Missing a you that I could not find
Promises of an eternal love
A Christ love
I didn’t want
I wanted the big rabbit friend
The dog who would dance
Under the moon with me
A rat to have coffee with
A cat to hug and tell me I’m easy
But I couldn’t find you
my heart ached
All the world makes so little sense!
Little raccoon, kind badger
Oh how I prayed
I was already gone
And you were hands I held as my own
One in the other
Death shakes us
And this world demands blood
I scream for it to stop
For some mercy I can’t reach
No more sickness
Don’t let her die
Don’t let it be bad
In the story books and plushes
I find that love
You’re not quite there
But it’s close
I call you close, in some dim sad light
I capture pitiful squiggles
That can only hint at you
Your handsome kind faces
Your elegant pose
Your ways you are here for me
I drag my years of it
To some hotel in Texas
And some man
In cat costume hugs me
maybe he doesn’t know
Maybe he does
inside my own rat costume
I’m crying
Because he feels like you
How I dreamed you would
And it’s too much
The spirit takes me
Not in church
But in some hotel in Texas
And so in the broken tooth language
The only one I know
I draw up some shaking structure
And in the ways I was trained
I worship
I call you by the moons name
And think of you as cinnamon
Not because it makes you more
But because I want you
In everything
I want
Like a wet wash of watercolor
To bleed into you
So that when I smell chamomile
I see rat eyes
When I taste basil I kiss badgers
When I read stories
I feel the tree of the page
And know it was touched
By paws that look like yours
At some point or other
I spin this story, in wash and word
Until I see many animals in many things
And the lonely boy isn’t crying
He’s a purple eyed coyote
Who sang the creation song
From the dark empty
The place of hopeless lonely
The empty house
He sang me into being
Not that god or those men
He did
That boy
And I can
With my silly mirrors
And other set dressings
Angle my spirit just so
So that I am a rat
Who came to him
When all was lost
I am that animal I miss
And I still miss that animal
I am that animal