hoarding ghosts

black nights against a white open sky,
spring is nearing
you cough open and endless and I wonder if you too are the winter
lost in snow blindness that edges on the last dark night of the frost moon
dying still
into a newly glossed-over spring
with trees so high we both can climb and scratch
in places where our marks will never be found
and when the heat hits
you can seek refuge behind drawers
under a bed where old chicken bones
will be jutting from your hips
and I'll gather you up in the heap...
that after the fact, never made any fucking sense to me...chicken bones?...
...yes, that's right...chicken bones
like every memory, like every nostalgia of flesh,
the old hungry bird skeletons that are now poultrygeist.
There was never a reason for them.
but their story will out-live me
like these ghosts that I've collected, unable to completely live down or leave behind.
My grave will read "here lies chicken bones!"
and I will not be found in the sediment,
just replaced by old marrow and knotted joints.
Apparitions that were momentarily stashed away,
found in my death, overly apparent and surprisingly foreign to those who had met me
or thought they had known me
during the life-span of all this unorthodox haunting,
unaware of the shame that had always rattled along with it
beneath my restless head