Michael S. Collins – Ⅱ

Drunk 

 

 

 

 

Thrown out into trembling air where a snowstorm

Is forming, sliding and slipping on terra firma, he

Goes back on his own track over footprints

The snow doesn’t bother with; he stumbles, knowing, as

Snow knows dust it forms on, that his tree of veins—

reticulate tips of generations—carry no sanctioned blood, only

A spray of red cries escaped from the planet’s

Hip flask of massacres. Falling face down, he recalls

How early on, his tongue jutting into language like a pier, he tasted

The raw salt that forms on sentences, and thought,

“surely every wave has its own flavor and song.

I’ll taste them all before I’m done.”