I sit here on a metal chair
hunched over, my head in my hands
I feel incredulous unable to wrap my mind
around being in this chamber of fools
with the others who came here as slaves
of a monster master.  

But each of us came with a captor within
who led us here in chains.

So here I am hiding my head
under a hood of shame.
I gave up my freedom
with each seemingly harmless fix
and step by step I led myself into the custody
of this man across from me.
Just this little bit won’t hurt,
I told myself.

And before long that trickle
became a roaring ravine -
me in the middle desperate
to keep my head above water.

The counselor sat there silently
with a look on his face that said
“Man, this is serious as a heart attack.”

But I’m not a ****** addict like the rest of these guys,
I thought to myself.  
I shouldn’t be here.  

And still he sat there, silent,
watching me cry, sniveling like a baby.  
This is not me
I thought
but here I am in my body
without the comfort or warmth
of a caring arm around my shoulders.  
Alone.  
Humiliated.

The poet looks
and delves.

She wonders if he ever stops,
him, this rushing-forward-breathlessly train,
if he did park himself in fantastical paragraphs;
the poet is dumbfounded at him
ceasing.

In construction sites of grammar,
where free ideas float in ruins,
poet wonders how,
how, how
he came to plan to live
up
to an exclamation mark.
And condensed so many dribbles and strikes
of strange and fruitful, even withered
paragraphs into one line and pointer -
a smile and a lope-stagger dance of a walk -
an exclamation mark.

The poet stares, once again
astounded by the little streaks of the universe
and longs to hold on to something.
Disarmed,
she can't quite put a finger on it,
his gaping honesty and his quiet one,
that contradiction
shouting in her face
while whispering in her eyes.

The poet laughs -
laughs of, in, out
of sleep.
Summer is here.
And she chooses to notice.
He laughs too,
but he's always been noticing
and the poet writes down how
she learnt to bite and chew into the fruit of the world
and taste

it sour runny sweet cold explosive lingering
just as him.
The poet saw all
colours rolling in one
strange song of limbs.
She did not like the music
but she made herself a blank white canvas

and listened
and laughed

clean, silly laughs
fluting out of the incongruity
of simple,
simple
moments.

Fun life, easy stretch of the mouth -
it is possible to smile down at
what a clown pain is.
He declares this boldly
without saying a word
or two.
The poet is dumbfounded at him
being.

She did not see and had not seen and now only began to picture
but she was blind.
He said he was blinder and that
was true. The poet
did not smirk but giggle at the irony -
he lived in pop-bold spectacles,
she slept in black and white films.
But both were blind.

We cannot see and
we
are blurs.

The poet likes that life scrapes away at her
because she can see chinks of white sunshine
through all the sheared-off layers.
Clean, clean,

bright, bright -
he teaches her in a beam
without a hello.

The poet writes poetry
on breathing action prose.
And she laughs -

You are everything I don't want
but I'm curious.