An Animal or a God

Paint glistens yellow in the night rain,
dark Bacardi pours easy over ice.
Like the ghostly colonials of Apocalypse Now—
lost to France, dying in Vietnam,
I’m stranded in this tiger wilderness.
Half-awake, sleep leeched by dread sense,
I avoid the sun, seal doors and blinds against
mutations of neighbor noise, music’s call.
My watch hangs from the hilt of a knife
embedded in a photo frame.
I’ve lost my image in shards of mirror.
Locating sectors that comfort and secure,
I squat between bed and wall.
The knock at the door is
my widowed lover with a pipe or
a summary of sins to date.
I rise from ready crouch to respond.

R.T. Castleberry‘s work has appeared in Roanoke Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Pedestal Magazine, Green Mountains Review, The Alembic and Visitant. Internationally, it has been published in Canada, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, New Zealand and Antarctica. His poetry appears in the anthologies: Travois-An Anthology of Texas Poetry, TimeSlice, The Weight of Addition, Anthem: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen, Kind Of A Hurricane: Without Words and Blue Milk’s anthology, Dawn. His chapbook, Arriving At The Riverside, was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2010. An e-book, Dialogue and Appetite, was published by Right Hand Pointing in May, 2011.