Nothing is indestructible.
We all know most things can be broken.
At home, in your friend’s toy chest
Breaking things in a place you’re considered a guest
I guess,
Breaking a bone hurts. I know through some testimonies
I wouldn’t know, but maybe eventually
That ninety or so broken degree
Painful message sent through the spinal cord holding me--
Together.
Underneath the thin material having been tethered.
The spine surviving endless stages of weather
Holding on to claim being a backbone helplessly held together
Hoping through each trimumph the chronic pain might feel better
Only holding onto the self as a go-getter
As life’s building blocks as the brick setter
The rain picks up
And life’s damp becomes wetter.
Just let her.
Things, as if they were pushed right over the edge
Smashed, or broken, as the smasher’s true pledge
It’s not me. These ten fingers deny
To be responsible for all the pain felt as the time passed me by
Maybe it was everything. The endless rotation of our planet.
Maybe it was this or that. ****, I have had it.
It wasn’t everything, or anything, or anyone or body
It wasn’t the unerasable ink splatter and splotting
It wasn’t the wind that knocked me over
It wasn’t the colors you’d paint me
It wasn’t the night,
It wasn’t the morning,
It wasn’t the past or present cold mourning.
It was not my limbs or the joints, or the ligaments that compose me
The fragments and pieces ] glued together intravenously
Each psalm taken in the hurricane seasons’ wrath
One, after another, too broken to cast
The two unequal hands ring based on the hour
Whose sounds was the ring of a shared life now gone sour
Because being ignored, as if I never existed is power
Unconsider yourself, at least today, that forever blooming flower.
I might be a million things. But of those not a coward.
Today you took the title with a medal to show off to the people you know
Welcome to the black and the white swan’s big show
At this point I’m the raven, she’ll never know
I was too drunk to function at the end of the show.
The curtains begin to rise, and I watch in surprise
How exposed and naked are the both of our lives
As your patience has taken time to disguise
Replacements as substitutions for the nature of the styles
We have to live life in the ways that we fight
Hoping for what we want in the end without struggle
How about perfection? I said on the double.
And those two uneven hands of the clock are due to change places
Ticking away at our concept of time
And aging our faces
The weeks pass us by
The days and the hours
Ask me who if not both of us are the coward
The giant dump truck grinds up countless materials
Making fragments of the things that existed for real
And what lasted in the bins of the emotions free wheels
Making internal rationalizations for what I tried to feel.
It’s over and over on what I wanted to seal
Were too many things to remember?
Dreams turning it all too, too real.
Turn my mind inside out I begin to expose now and peel.
How long will it take to forget
Or to heal?
I don’t know what to call this.
And idea or what’s real.
I’ll tell you what the heart asked for his final meal
Peace to believe what we did have was real.
Life keeps grinding up what treasures I’ve collected.
Forget what memories I ever recollected
All I’m asking is that I remain intact and protected.
But no one can guarantee me that.
No one can ask me to offer up my hands frostbitten with your cold
No one can ask me to bluff followed by my own fold
No one can ask me the number of me having been sold.
There was one dream and I bought it.
Except the belief in the memory is what I’ve left to have fought it.
I don’t ask or expect to ever be repaired.
But you didn’t break me, so why were you ever so scared?
Maybe for the immeasurable amount that you actually cared.
But today’s findings have left me quite frankly impaired.
I didn’t exist to you at all. I was the invisible man.
I use all my abilities to understand as I can.
But nothing makes sense to the invisible man.
So he hopes and he hopes for just one part of him to be seen.
One of his hands through the smoke in your overly-woven screen
To knowingly be holding one of yours, when your reality’s clean.
I’m the invisible man.
Pretending not to see me was a game played unclean.
I hope one day in your life he exists.
Parting through the smog and the fog and the mist
As I feel forgotten in both my clenched fists
What's left is to let go of those fogged moments like this.
vi.xxiii.xii
Copyright © Jimena Zavaleta 2012