Bloody Backpack

Bloody Backpack

Resting all of its pounds on the trapezius of your son.

Ends, drug through sediment, splinters flaking base corners.

Wooden, like the tree a small man climbed to see the carrier.

Rawhide occasionally misses body and leaves cardinals streaking the sides

Zippered flesh, rips off, attaches to the bark, it dangles back and forth in humid air.

The shape of laminin, of the x-structure at the core of the whirlpool galaxy,

this one, able to feel, touch, contact, taste, feel, fondle, graze, grope, kiss, peck, pet, push, rub, tap, collide with, blow on, stroke, scratch or it scratches you. Very Real.

Wine, rubbed off the fleshy bark and onto the wooden bark, It drips, it runs,

and it leaks into the dust. Forming; out of water coral, treeless

peaches, and filleted salmon. The weight like the donkey he once rode

in on, design, under the rusty blood, once was swirls. Amphitheaters

and insignia to show the years endured, famines and floods. But none

of it mattered, because it was cut to planks, Nailed together to form

lifelike, wooden, laminin. Pegged into the ground, for a human to hang

from. By way of three metal slabs pierced through the radial artery.

Crimson blood, tattered skin jacket, soot on foot stands.

I pick up mine daily, and carry it.