Written by Biff Mitchell
I’m a water cowboy, surfing the crest of a wild limbic wave and
sweating a dream where everything’s sprawling
and tumbling uncontrollably and demons and darklings
and steam-nostrilled stallions with fiery eyes
and fangs in their mouths and hell in their seed
all
converge on the crest of the wave as I wake to knowing that it’s
not really a dream
it’s real and I’m a thousand feet high
on a hell board in flames riding
the crest of a knowledge that threatens to swallow me
a knowledge with terrain and geography
like a map I can feel, as I hotdog the crest
of its peaks over caverns that lie
deep in the secrets it keeps from me
I’m a water cowboy, riding the roof of the life I’ve lived
the birthdays and anniversaries
the scrapes and the bruises and
first day new school fears
and tears for lost pets buried with Popsicle crosses
or flushed down the toilet
and the moment of realization when
Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny vaporize
into the horror of growing up
like a roller coaster of fate flying past the years I remember
and the years I missed somehow
with their magic and somehow with their dreams somehow
and someday a cowboy and someday a surfer on the crest
of the wave I’ve been riding and now a water cowboy
skimming the surface of memory in the seconds the wave
has left for me
I’m a water cowboy rounding up my life with
fiery-eyed demons and blue-eyed angels like
the roller coaster line-up, all fears and giggles and
tickets in hand and you never know it’s too late until
the train leaps over the rail and fifty water cowboys
and water cowgirls yahoo into the night like
crashing into the brick wall of the world
too late to turn back, too late to change course
to wonder why, too late to look away
too late to jump off the crest of the wave
I’m riding like fury in the last
few seconds the last two seconds the last second that stretches
across the certainty of where the wave is taking me
folding around me like returning to the womb’s flood and flow
and gurgles
and trickles
and silence
Text © Biff Mitchell
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Thank you!
NIce work. Anaphora has been a successful device for many famous poet, even if it takes away some Bam.
This poem is magnificent. I can totally relate.
love this!