You see things they don't. Colors. Sticks. Flies.
The way the moon breaks across the creek when Luster throws stones.
They stalk, they stalk, around you their words worm like night crawlers.
Words flying like the birds you watch, never landing where you can reach.
You shadow across grass. Your hands remember what your mind cannot.
The fence. The gate. The flower crushed underfoot. You picked it.
Caddy.
***
You smell honeysuckle before her face appears.
Trees and leaves and something else.
Something makes the buzzing go quiet. When she goes something goes.
A howl with no how. A grunt with no grun.
Time moves wrong for you.
Yesterday bleeds into tomorrow. The clock strikes, meaning nothing.
You're thirty-three, you’re three. Both at once. Neither completely.
T.P. lifts you onto his shoulders. The world shifts, higher now. Hold.
Different.You feel your throat making sounds. You choke..
They're not right sounds, all you have left in your mouth.
The pasture. Changed now. Missing in black. Fire gone.
You stand at the fence. Looking. Waiting.
Your hands grip wood until splinters come.
***
Dinner table voices rise and fall. Anger in the air like lightning before storm.
You rock.
Back and forth.
Like the swing by the tree, but the tree is gone now. You rock to find it again.
To find it with your splintered hands.
Sleep comes like moonlight rolling over hills. Dreams you can speak.
Where words make sense coming out instead of going in.
Where Caddy smells like trees.
Morning. Again. Always. Never. Then.
You watch fireflies flash trapped in your fingers glowing through flesh.
Everything beautiful hurts.
***
You hear her name and break something.
They don't understand it's the breaking to make the feeling stop.
To make outside match bonfire in the belly.
To break things.
You watch the bonfire.
The clock hands melt. Time passes or doesn't.
You are here or elsewhere.
The mirror shows someone you don't recognize.
You turn away. You bray. You how. You try to try to try to try to say.
The world is too loud with the things you cannot say.
The colors in the picture are warm and beautiful just like you Benjy!