Broken River Roads Poem by Joshua Bantum

If you look at words right,
Or in the right light,
In be-tween the spaces,
Holes cre-ated by words,
Dashes act
like rocks,
A river is cre-ated in downstream form,
From title,
Towards death

And with gaps like bridges between sentences,

Nothing makes se-nse unless you follow,

Over this trail,

This twist-ed abstraction that life has presented me with,
An ex-ist-ence,
I can’t
quite per-suade you with,
Not with just words,

So you cross,
Carry-ing it’s burden along life,
Down these streams that
lay be-tween words
And events that mean
nothing,
But some-thing to you
Or to
me, If alone.

And towards the end
It trickles down to three
Streams when you’re older
And then two
It contin-ues to
Shrink too
One,
And life
Is close
To over
It ties
Knots in
Your stomach
And when
You start
To lose
Interest it
All, Explodes, and the light takes vision away, replacing it with ecstasy,
It strangles me with the water I’m sucking in and I can’t feel anything but numb
Body parts, and they hang like plastic ornaments as my body floats towards fate, emptyi-ng all my life towards the bottom of this swimming pool, and all those rivers that simplified to few, became many and scattered with no noticeable pattern like the rest of existence, and you feel everything, every drop of every storm, all the strikes of every match like lightening across your spine crawling along towards fire’s flaming ambered and floating particles that torch every nerve as your body has no subjective view because it’s been slashed away with aging dust’s thin sharp edge, and your body of empty matter explode-s with death into this life that contains everything,
And brought back from that, something sticks with you,
Small reminders of yo-ur rape,
Being taken advantage of by the One and All,
In a ritual involving the drowning of a child,
And only flashbacks of her back etched along the curves of this earth’s mountains
Remind you of all the small rivers that life used to
Be created of, having tiny perspectives you stick by
As if they were the only ones that existed,
And when your with her you feel
Like one
River,
But it’s inescapable to avoid
That if in between
All these words
Create rivers,
The blank white
On all sides
Is the wid-ening ocean that has
Let these
words
Be the
earth that
grounds me
To her, to this, and to everything
That keeps me alive
These rocks re-strict-ing flow
And drawing lines in…..the sand

Will always be here
If “I’m” here.