Twenty Six.

I didn't think it was possible for you to still break my heart.

But seeing that picture of you - with him and your son
in that house I don't recognize
in clothes you never would have worn before
with a tight, uncomfortable smile on your face -
I can feel the corners of my chest peeling away
to reveal something raw,
exposed bone and sinew that
aches as I breathe.

I guess a part of me still loves you.

Twenty Five.

Feverish heat
sweeps over muscle and bone
until I'm blind,
pitch black
with white flashes of
the gleam of
your eyes,
the curve of
your shoulder
as you lift me
into your arms.

Twenty Four.

I wish I could scream,
but I swallow it whole,
bitter, boiling bile
swirling low in the swell
of my belly
until I am bulging
with raging fire,
pouring white,
searing light
from my fragile,
wilting pores.
I am symbolically,
metaphorically
drowning in my own rage,
lungs filling with black sludge
that I should spit out
onto the table,
into my plate
(so the waitress doesn't
have to clean up my mess)
but instead I gulp the tar
down my throat
like the water that could save me
but this is poisoning me,
an infection turning septic.

I need to learn how to be more vocal.

Twenty Three.

"Come here, boy." My body bends, arches towards her hum. 

"Come here, boy." That tune is familiar, tugging at a memory hiding deep within.

"Come here, boy." I can't fight the pull of her sounds, her rhythm, her pulse. 

"Come here, boy." I wish I could ask her to stop, even as I beg her to continue.

"Come here, boy." A siren song, the bite of waves nipping at my ankles, undertow claiming my skin like forgotten baggage.

"Come here, boy." I barely hear her now, her melody lost, bouncing somewhere above the twisting sea. 

"Come here, boy."

I'm here. But where are you?

Twenty Two.

These graceful lies
spill from lips that burn
as they graze the skin on my neck
but I can't hear them,
can't detect the mask
that hides your
crooked smile
even as my fingers slide
over razor-sharp edges,
because you're beautiful
and I love you,
and those are blinding words,
denial words
when things get tough,
and I know that
but I can't look you in the eye
because I don't want to know
and have to give you up.

I'd rather keep you here,
feel your warmth,
at least for now,
than force myself
to accept the truth.

Twenty One.

I sit on my living room floor,
apartment walls safely standing,
television screen clearly projecting
destruction,
smoke and glass,
broken homes,
broken bodies of
children
with their entire lives
to lose,
lost, gone,
blinked out
like a star exploding
a million miles away
and it all seems
so
far
away
but it's not.
It's in my house,
it's in my eyes,
it's in my heart now
and it's heartbreaking,
shattering
and wrong, so wrong
that it takes my breath away.
I am speechless
but now is the time to speak.

It's time for someone to speak.

Twenty.

Which came first -
the chicken or the egg?

Better question!
Which came first -
the writer or the idea?

Should be easy answer,
but it isn't
is it?

Do I birth ideas
(therefore, writer first)
or do ideas birth me
(therefore, idea first)?
Would I have been the writer
had the idea not struck me,
or is it that I was born the writer
and later discovered the idea?

Perhaps I am some anomaly
in which neither came first
then second
but simultaneously
as if by divine creation?

Perhaps that was a bit presumptuous.