You Will Fight Me in Virginia

Brambles know little of thorns.
they’re neighbors
but they don’t really know each other.
That’s what you said as I flew down the state line
between Tennessee and Virginia.
Your seemingly poignant terms were backlit
by the blistering shades of cornflower and blood red
that splatter painted the sky through the little roof window
of that big white truck.
I counted the fibers in my pillowcase creating a rudimentary lean to
against the impenetrable aperture in the wall of the vehicle.
I examined their complicated community of networking.
Social and diverse in nature
they did not divert from their calculated path.
The blue threads knew much of the white threads
and the white went on being blinding
ignoring the blue threads cry
“Take me for crying out loud,
I am beautiful too.”
It’s a bit like our situation
don’t you think?
I wish you had tried to be a little less blinding
and poignant in your coercion.
Your flawlessness detracts from this journey I’m taking.
This world of rusty air conditioners and squeaking faucets
it’s a beautiful oasis of musings.
The stone pendulum that swings in time
with the in and out breath of a miniature universe’s president
is the prodigious metronome of my heartbeat.
The sounds of my own piteous soliloquies
mix and mingle with disturbing simplicity
with the echoes of the powder men on their ghostly horses.
Galloping up and down the lawn
their hooves stamping in the places
where small coins are buried.
I feel them under my feet and in between my toes
the tin, copper, and bronze
something solid in an all too ghostly world.
I pick one up and rub it in between my fingers
letting particles of dirt drift back down to their origin.
Maybe, maybe if I swallow the coins
just eat them like sugar drops
my insides will be composed of something more substantial
than mere tissue.
Then maybe I will have enough fortitude to handle you
you and your haunting nature.
You have followed me here to this place
not on ghostly horseback or in a big white truck
but you have ridden in on the limbs of torment
in an effort to make sure
that no matter how far I go
the essence of your immortality will stay with me.
You will fight me in Virginia
with your leaden limbs of regret bearing arms.
I will taste of you with the metal in my mouth.
I will hear you calling “On!”
to those founders in their tasseled caps.
You will certainly thrive marvelously
in your attempts to be the thorn to my bramble.
But you are incorrect in your initial remark.
If I am a bramble and you are my thorn
you must reassess your meditation.
Because I know you all to well.