"Drawing Back" is a poem from the upcoming collection of poems, "The Sun Will Eat You Too" (2024) by BW Derge - all rights reserved by author - protected by copyright
Drawing Back
Let me retreat
And tell the king
I’ve given up on this shit-
-
There is too much waiting
For the right word to appear
And like a bird at five in the morning,
Its beauty never comes
-
Until it aggravates maggots trying to doze off,
I wanted the song when I wanted it-
Not now, go away,
Let me retreat away
From the stacked isopod identities,
-
Give me my solitude.
Tell the king I’m no longer here
To be the jester or the blind follower
Or the rooster,
I don’t know what I am or where I belong
So I sit on the sand,
-
The miniscule grains of infinite uncertainty
Separated and conjoined
With an even larger ocean of doubt-
There will be no conquering this
Or outliving this-
Finding the answer or truth like buried treasure
Is improbable and therefore
Not worth the effort,
-
Stop digging your grave,
Seeking a bunch of gems that don’t exist.
Just sit and contemplate the mysteries
That can’t be solved
Until you’re a skeleton buried,
Just as lost as any hypothetical treasure
That might dwell deep under the sand,
Never to be discovered,
-
So drink like a sailor until your liver is nothing
But a stray starving cat
Seeking one last fishbone
Before choking to death,
Leaving the decomposing feline corpse
To be washed out by a storm,
-
The fire whiskey reminds me
Of the little discrepancies
Gnawing at the nervous spinal root
-
At the base of the neck
Until there is nothing to do but be rude
And show how scorned you are-
Remind the world of how petty
A monster can get
When he doesn’t even but half understand
The realities around him-
But there is no key or legend
On this sensory map outline,
-
The markers are of masked pain
And nothing else,
No big red diagonal intersecting lines
Indicate where any gold lies-
There are only big black death circles,
Filled in with dark ink,
Saying this is where the uncertainty began,
And this is where you got lost,
-
This is where you told the king you retreated,
So you got banished, but forgot-
You thought it was a choice to be here
On the beaches
But this is exile, this is prison-
You are the farthest thing from free,
So please-
-
Let me retreat.
Back to simpler solitude
Where no sniper of misconstrued memory
Is waiting lurched up in a tree somewhere,
Holding the trigger,
Going to shoot whenever he pleases,
-
Pierce my peace
With the thorny thoughts
About all the temporal stuff I have lost-
I want to enjoy being lonely again,
I want the thoughts to stop spiraling
-
Around your visage,
I want the emotional vat to stop concocting
Its own potions
And just make cold beer to drown the heart in-
So finally consciousness and life can slip away
With no regard for past crimes-
Tell the king I’ve retreated
-
And he never knew about me at all-
What truth remains has been thrown
To the waterfall waves at sea,
Never to be recovered
-
Or salvaged
Or rebuilt-
It will disintegrate,
And be gone forever, great.
And that’s it.
© USA
written by BW Derge, copyright protected, all rights reserved 2024
