POETRY

by Stephen Kelly

I'll disappear in a forest in November like he did you think,
you a sad boy of twenty. a book you don't read you half read
half dream is what does it. a few pages in you nearly burst,
the smell of revelation is so great. he's in woods, it's dark,
darker, he's barely on two feet, soon he isn't, you don't see.
it gives you a feeling you need. some words make you feel it,
those you keep. most of them you aren't sure of, those elude
you. there are many words, far too many.
a dark knot of growth is what he says the woods are. it's
what the words give you. a nest of roots and limbs where you
disappear. a smell of some deep place where rot makes a meal
of you, you funny to taste, alive but just barely.
those words dark knot gave you this. it's a know because
they tied it in you, it's dark because what's in it you can't
see, you can only feel how, touch a way in. it made an
impression on me when I thought was him. I feel the page
I was on, I see the words, where I was it was a day in May.
where I am now the forest has one words in it.