Photo of hose taken from inside the house.
Dear hose hanging on a hook, what do you know?
Green and grey of a dying day, you hang like sausages in a butcher shop. Skin smooth yet crusting with gunge, body bent at the elbows.
Water feeds though your conduit case, around and around like a hydro slide. Weighted residue, is carried in the cups of your linked hands.
You talk to the birds as you rest, and wait. Sometimes you leak onto your wooden foundation, slowly rotting at the spine. You witness moments of beauty, and long periods of decay. You can’t move on your own. You hang heavy with function, pulled down to the earth like my jowls on a Sunday morning.
When life sucks the moisture from the air, you kick into action. You are a connector, connected, pulling water from an invisible reservoir, pushing into and onto, dry, thirsty, mouths. Scraping and grazing, dragged by the hair. Pulsing from the inside, no legs to carry. You slunk like a worm descending the stairs.
Torrents burst from your face. And sometimes through your seams. Jets too strong for a blemished complexion. You exhale. But with an ever-present surging, you never quite catch your breath.
Retracting now, you are pulled by the leg, dragging debris in your fingernails, belly grazing on the gravel as you go.
Hoisted onto the hook, you remain heavy. Wet within the folds of your spirited entrails.