I find stillness
Beside pangs of suspension
I’m worn
Dull around the edges
As sea glass
And just as weathered
Four months ago you knew me
Now it seems circumstances
Let you forget
I talk to your dial tone
It tells me I might look familiar
Though how you recognized me
You can’t put your finger on
Or couldn’t
Or wouldn’t admit that you once had
I’ll go back later
Dust for prints
…..we’ll find me
If there’s enough of me left
That’s not entombed
I knew better
convinced myself there was a grey area
Room for interpretation
And you, a regular gumshoe
Uncovered my deception
I knew better
Yet I had to gnaw away at the
Verity of my commitment to you
Any sense of loyalty we erected
I don’t see a way to alleviate the
Severity of my infractions
My omissions mock me
Stick to me like the web I was captured in
You asked me for a candid experience
While my appearance remained veiled
Who gets to choose who has unlimited access to their vices? I am labeled for mine when everyone pointing the finger gets to carry on and use theirs to get by. I have to remain the poor little sober hand who is reduced to clonidin and ambien. Reduced to sweating like a pig, breaking out and twitching like a rat in a cocaine experiment whose just been injected with go-go juice?
I get to sit in my misery with a plastic smile plastered on my face and mumble the words “I’m getting by, time heals all wounds,” when I know that what time really does is pile one wound atop another until all one can see is the festering, puss bubble of your collection of wounds. Finally, when the smell is too putrid, the pain too poignant, and the priests are all busy dipped in their own versions of serenity….that’s when this thing will overtake me.
Of a few injuries
Too torturous not to embrace
I live in the dark parts
Excuses to crave
Cover my collapses with an opiate elixir
It’s normal protocol
The souls of those whose sanity is
fragile fascínate me
Convinced I must remedy their burdens
Counsel their demons
I’ve survived somehow
So I owe this debt
In the privacy of this parchment
I am left to withdraw
If I tried to chronicle the frequency of my
Inadequacy the fruit of my diagnosis
Would roll over and mold.
I keep pieces of myself, spare parts
To trace, outline their fragile sigils
I bear down harshly
Pierce the skin until I can
Smell the wound
Like flesh left too long in the sun.
I live so that it burns – the kind that
Peaks off in intricate sheets
Layers of static
My interpreters on the fritz.
That’s me….a circus act
Still, this time
The shards before me wink with potential
And I bristle at the fluency of their silence
Seems as though my air has abandoned me and though I trained
As athletes do in a flurry of sweat
An aire of discipline-
There will surely be blood
The knowing helps
As if I can slow the process
Or let the distractions stare
Blank as patience
Swallow the days sentiment.
My duty is sacrosanct
The very melody of Mnemosyne
Who I aim to be.
If I knew your bones
Would be burnt
Turn to ash;
Incinerate
Maybe I would have
Knelt into the same syringe
Let it sting
As liquor & death & loss do
Maybe I could have
Drank the sweet maple of your
Poison opium
Taken it straight from your veins
As though you had merely been
Bitten by a snake…
As though I could save you.
For too long I’ve withdrawn within these lines
Whined at the enormity of the page
Pondered how best to fill in the blanks
A hunch whispers to me
If I match the correct utensil to the
Appropriate line in a chosen notebook
Writers block will cease to cap my pen
The Melodic movement of stanza development
Lulled by a truly poetic trance,
A prophetic poise to my hand….
the pen is practically possessed
It’s a painkiller kind of day
The type to murkily meander through
In search of a new host
My frailties are coercively compelling
I deliberate the best way to shatter
A purge, maybe
Allow the euphoria of embellished
Remnants to cloak the calamity of
My ravenous allergy
Will my eulogy speak of the magnitude
Or multitude of my malfunctions?
Or will it whisper
Unwittingly, as if to no one at all
Of an indelible imposter for which
There was no aversion?
In the interim my ritual is simple
To scribble inconsolable drivel
Deliberate the details of what
Seizing scrawl could adequately
Reverberate from my tomb
Truth Scerum 