Coffin Boy

by Rory Fleming

He always was a coffin
Now there is a body in it
The dead girl ignores
His chapped wooden walls

The coffin man was hungry
For a weight to keep him there
In the ground, or
Something new to decompose with him
Under waves of rolling time

Six feet under from pain
Doves shoot from his crumbling chest
The first lock is deposed by new chains
Rusting melting silver

I dig with my shovel at night
Avoiding the flashlight of the keeper
His imagined breath hangs over my neck
But I know he is not truly there

My brow is soiled
Droplets of sad sweat hang over my eye
Like a reverse tear

They shouldn’t be this far in the dirt
Below the layers of memories
It is too much past to toss into
My equally rusted wheelbarrow