Bastard Drought

Water, why did you leave me so long in California?

Water, I heard you went to Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, the subcontinent.

You were drinking again, beat up some women and kids, fucked anything that could move.

Water, watch me one more time down the slide before business, as usual, takes you away from us?

Why’d you up and leave mother and me without so much as spitting in our direction?

Your absence comes with fire in its eyes, reads all the deadwood diaries where I write my sorrow.

They were not for you, they were not for not you. I wish I could have seen you in all your glory many years before I was born, when your remaining family says you danced beautifully across the land, with fire, ice, ocean-cool inhales and exhales.

Water, you deadbeat, just a twinkle in the Father Sky I can no longer recognize.

Blue loses its cool, the trees need a color saver. You’ve cost me so much therapy.

Weather I can become the many you baptized me to be.

Weather I can build a family out West.

Weather it now means having you too much or too little, the fearful-avoidant attachment bond.

Dry sets in again, but a fairer whether

feels closer when I remember waterhood within,

and that the men who refused you love, made you cover up their sick deeds,

are not me, when leading my children

to bathe, dry, brush, and rest in deepening waves.