Truls Ljungström’s Reviews > Fire Water World: Poems > Status Update

Visionary delights to my stranger’s brain
were betrayed by a doppelganger
who used my name.
Ah me! Was it I or Us, my lovely?
Was it my false fur flaming or the milk tit of rain?
Surely my tenuous thumping connected all felt?
For twenty years I found dark magnets
in the Yellowstones of various beds.
My engines were flooded, the windows were broken
and the bears
those damn bears were dancing.

My night’s wind scheme of public words
was read like canned applause.
My Edens applesauce was red, Hell
my lonely blood was the cause.
I was the serpent chomping its own lusty tail.
Rolling down the sawdust aisles of switchblade
taverns I was the first and final wheel.
Through two decades of bad road I heard
.tade winds scream the import of variety.

and I cried and held the pillow, muddled
in the melodrama of the quite immature
but anyway, Uncle Adrian. .
Here I am in the reservation of my mind
and silence settles forever
the vacancy of this cheap city room.
In the wine darkness my cigarette coal
tints my face with Geronimo’s rage
and I’m in the dry hills with a Winchester
waiting to shoot the lean, learned fools
who taught me to live-think in English.

She is the one who could not marry me
because of the dark-skin ways in my blood.
Love like that needs no elegy but because
of the baked-prick possibility of the flame lakes of Hell
I will give one last supper and sacrament
to the dying beast of need disguised as love
on deathrow inside my ribcage.
I have not forgotten the years of midnight hunger
when I could see how the past had guided me

I flew into Denver April.
Rock salt and sand peppered the asphalt
reflecting myself on a downtown street
where I'd paused on my route to smell lilacs.
The wanton winds chortled wickedly
over remnant snows in gray clumps of doom
and my heart soared gladly at winter’s death
but an hour later I had whiskey breath
at a dead end bar full of Indians.

The photo I send is ten years old:
the day chilled my braids but my body was lean
and my bourbon eyes looked simply sweet.

Mounting years and endless beers
have dimmed the long road home.
Shabby thoughts rise like Phoenix dust
to spook my intellect.
Gone is that keen mind of youth, discarded
like a snakeskin.
My skeleton, somewhat linear drips the weakest
of poison so the letter I write is filled with lies.
The bloat, the gray, the angst and I
fall lost between the lines.

Sandy, you remember her?
Firm and dark with braided hair
she went to school at Pine Ridge High?
Well, on coke she choked her baby good-bye
yes, she was a daughter of Crazy Horse.

Schooled namers of names
are but fatherless boys
who deal in the demanding joys of posing
pragmatic mountains of purple
against the rose-fingered dawn
or giving coyotes human minds.
Damn it, here we're lost in lairs of necessity
where this is that and tit for tat
you stare me wrong and I'll dust your ass
and we read only to see who died last week.
Yes, we are the children of Crazy Horse.

Between the sensual
and the visionary
how can our spirits extinguished by spirits
discern the dancing of ghosts?