THEE POETRY LIVING ROOM 01
jump
I am waiting for your failure
so that I may go ahead.
It’s a giddy relief,
a gentle schadenfreude,
like the feeling of catching a doctor
smoking outside the hospital.
Please, be my excuse
I do not want to have to try again
I was done with this comfortable mess a long time before,
but again here we are:
you watching another slow fight respond to life,
barely a bruise-colored flicker this time,
not so much desperate as a tired, flippant order, “this is the one,”
and so here I am now:
trying with pathetic strength to accomplish this new broken vessel.
Every yawn cracks hundreds of sockets
and the slightest stretch shatters my atrophy.
My senses so sensitive that I have to
plug up my ears as the train passes above me.
This is all I’ve known now,
but I am here again:
a decade past due and ironically timed,
that I would finally, slowly, have retrieved myself from under the rubble,
& patched up some holes,
some left for aesthetic or reminder, some so deep and festered and putrid
that the putty just will. not. set.
And so crushingly tired, all 360 degrees of me.
The thing is:
there is no dusting off
because you don’t dust off time;
it’s a disservice to the trauma that plays through the body -
and boy, let me tell you, mine is
a long-ago decommissioned jungle gym
you have no business breaking into,
no matter how late at night.
But don’t let me fall off track here again:
we both know my tendency,
and it’s tough enough just taking in a full breath today,
pushing it down into the belly,
so that when the ribs expand, careful
that they don’t crack against the belt that is fastened around them.
The stench of muddy snow and megalophobia and
everything like gravity is made up of millions of
misleadingly small weights stuck under pinewood derby cars
to make them go fast,
but I am still going always the slowest.
Some days I write on an index card
the same useless mantra that didn’t kill me the last dozen tries:
I promise
you’ll build a makeshift
to get through today.
All this damage quantified by the
merest stretch of grumpy colors, memory scents, and that thick sticky air you’re breathing, speaking to the same disappointing point:
I’m tired
Can’t sleep
Still, I keep waking up
Dear Winter
When you and she have found none
you are sent to die
Build her, dear, a jail you see fit
Say, ‘come in the winters, dear’
That field that is near, die in its mild skylight and storm
When you are under its regal shower
all is well and you aren’t aged
So it is of these broken bottles
you are free of age tonight
Your death is not sick
free of all of it
all that is urgent, you are free of these things
the noose tightens
so glaze over and die
that Nature might hear the crack of your neck