Exhausted

Pressure steaming hot like a burning kettle

Nowhere to go

Stays inside

Making me melt into my bones

Pressure is on, gotta stay on top

All your work can’t be for nothing,

But it certainly feels exhausted into nothing

Yes, like the melted down bones.

I never gave up

Even when my battered fish lungs were carried in the desert air;

I never gave up

Even when my blue-bird call

The soft, quavering kew

Was torn apart in the waves of the salty brine of the hot Red-Sea,

I never gave up when my body was thrown through the house of your torment

To gather up your fraught-lightning grip

To steal my heart from others,

I still cannot give up,

Though I am exhausted,

My words are frost-bitten, torn, mangy, old,

The mystic river that sounds off my deceased brother from a thousand years ago,

And your brother,

Dreaming of the muddy mess of the mighty Mississippi gleaming off its shadowy mysteries that steep low and wide,

Exhausted by the hard truths it has had to carry.