the taste of metal

clack clack clack

nothing is pure anymore

A broken promise, a kind of mutiny.

I traced the grout between the tile,
thinking,

Only a God could make people out of dust
and expect them to recover.

A life without fear is a life without friction.

Good riddance!*

Scream something in the privacy
of your mind and the body
might reject it. Gagging on the
thought, false and fumbling
but raw nonetheless.

I could only think of ugly words
for it, haggard, maybe, wasting, rot,
so I changed my tune to angry.
Sad makes us pale and sick,
but furious is fetching.

Bitter taste on the tongue, don't flatter
yourself. You weren't the one who
taught me, "they'll never say it back."
I had a lifetime of prayer for that.
You didn't make me this way; you
just stepped on the landmine.

Mangled and mine.
Tell death how you like it and
maybe you can get down on all fours,
pretend it was me that did you *****,
pretend it was me with a noose in my hand.

The way it itches inside, the
cacophony of it all, the utter music
of the moment in screeches.
It is anything but romantic.
It is something I broke my arms
to reach.

Just underneath the surface,
something dark and impatient.
It's always been there, sharp and
rubbed the wrong way, cursing and
simmering. Sometimes I think
you know exactly what you're doing.

I wonder how many people have ran the stop sign
on the "corner of happy and healthy," or who has held
that feeling of wrong at gunpoint and tried making demands.
These are bottom of the drawer days when you join the heap
in the closet, where your mismatched shoes live, the
background music bleeding from the score.

I said I wouldn't write about suicide anymore.
I wish I would have kept the old poems I wrote
because memory never serves me right, and I'm liable to
make the same mistakes, like when we met at the
atrophy of empathy, the misplaced apostrophe in
a long line of ****** letters. Mama always said, sometimes
you just gotta grit your teeth.

Another moment, another day that stretches into even
more still, and the sensation of bubbling and spilling over,
when the ground feels less like the ground and more
like a tightrope. You thought things would be different,
but they're not. You thought there would be some
order to it all, some rules for being, but here we are, scrambling.
Here we are, feeling for a light switch in a very dark room.

Journal ramblings, everything a corner, the sins that wait
for you outside the confessional booth while you repent.
Hold this for me, you said. I am still holding this for you,
so climb inside the gun cabinet and make yourself comfortable.
You’re going to be here awhile.

The psychologists and psychiatrists go for a drink and talk
about the nutcases while I throw straw wrappers
their way. Maybe they do not know this winter, but I do.
I know the depth of something flat and how it feels to snap
and be snapped. I have built us a city and watched it burn,
turned it inside out, inversion of inertia, speeding toward the
thing that lies underneath the surface, amorphous shapes
and blurs of color you claw at for hours.

I was going to tell God to take a hike but I showed him
to the bus stop instead. Small mercies, I only wanted
a little miracle. Can you blame me? But there are prices to pay,
always prices to pay, even when your credit is ****, so you
drive away instead, past the city, watch the green blobs blotting
the landscape, the creams and beige of the field making
your breath catch, the sun glinting off the wheat. You can barely
see it, but you can see it, and you want to slam on the brakes,
recollect the fleeting scene before it escapes.

This isn't what you wanted.
This isn't what you dreamt for yourself,
but this is what you have.
Scoot closer to me. I want someone to ride this out with.