open your mouth,
wider, wider,
don’t stop just because i didn’t say wider again,
keep on going,
all the way to the floor,
then a little bit further,
i want to be able to step into your mouth comfortably,
so i can better examine what it is you’re saying,
then maybe we won’t have these late-night tete-a-tetes,
and i can get a good night’s rest,
and get up on time to go to work
for one of our sake’s
brutality sometimes looks different upside down,
when a goat is feeding you a three-course
dinner at a restaurant built in the
middle of the forest
that some might describe as enchanted,
and given the fact that there’s a goat chef feeding people,
i can kinda see their point,
but it’s not all that uncommon,
and really, most late-night-stage capitalism
ends in a back-of-the-alley,
back-of-the-creek,
back-of-the-cul-de-sac,
back-to-and-then-from-the-future,
fight to the death,
but without fists
if the apology comes from a sincere place,
somewhere deep inside of you,
then maybe we can chalk this all up to a misunderstanding,
maybe even laugh about it
one day, though i know you might think that’s unlikely,
while you lay there bleeding out,
like a cigarette on the side of the road
that pedestrians kick about or avoid,
and maybe if you don’t make it through this ordeal,
then i dunno,
but i guess i’ll be the one to owe you an apology
myself
Fred Aiken Writing 