Natural

Lightning through the wood of the bat--my youth, that shrimp toast, left me struck outside like an old tempura of a shoe in some sort of right-field insinister as in rain. I sat next to the dug-up out-window there, sniffing my socks through a red child’s telephone dial, and I wanted to call you and see if the smell fell to you linear-cracked across the meaning of my words.  You weren’t there, or at least not in the kind of way I’d remembered, but I stunk and stunk.  And then your highness came to me, low as I was, and the bureaucratic height of the paper-shredded years got craggy and goat-merded with atavisms since we last spoke, I dunno, I didn’t look down, but there it was in plain, saved, hard-driven view, fitted just like a wall against every door and just a little too tight to allow any opening.  Tacking it all over, I ran out of paper trying to entice the old goats to eat a tunnel big enough for me to shepherd my starving through.