Six of us here
in the bland and zinc-white
waiting room, small
machine on the floor
burning the air
with brown noise.
We're nominally here
for group therapy,
but in truth we prefer
to ritually founder
in great excesses of civility.

The therapists all but plead
for us to say right upfront
exactly what we don't like
about each other.
That's uncomfortable,
and each of us toys with the idea
before securing the old masks.

My own mask isn't the Venetian
kind, or the grotesque
Twilight Zone voodoo variety,
but the clear hospital type,
used to inhale great lungs of ether.

Sometimes sincerity creeps
from the gaps,
sometimes I do my best
to collapse into this checkered chair,
close my eyes and hide
in the sound of my blood.
It sounds surprisingly like
the brown noise machine.

I'm up against it.
I'm not getting younger,
and these feel like last chances
to learn to be, in a way
where I don't end up
shut away, eating myself alive,
riddled with depression
and loneliness and long black
strings of guilt that resonate
like a tritoning cello.

The thought carries:
The six of us
are an atonal sextet
of numbness and refusal,
dread, attraction, the works.
Around us, the whole room
is phthalocyanine green,
blue shade.
Therapist's preference,
probably calming,
soft music in the eye,
and it almost works.

But instead I am lost
in new haircuts,
in leggings ripped
behind the knee,
in the way a lamp
hunches over like an ibis.

Anything to avoid it,
anything not to admit it,
admit that despite years of this,
years of looking out
the high window into
the red riot of Farragut Square,
years of forcing myself
to say terrible
and incriminating things
while rain and snow
attacked the window,
I am still sick with feelings
where I must belong to someone,
must be deeply known,
or else I've never been
anything at all.