Kerry Bernatchez Poet Lyric

Blank Walls and Playing Dead

Blank walls glare—  
mute sentinels of my undoing.  
I need to speak.  
To hear the echo of my own decay.  
Am I alive?  
Do I register?  
Do I haunt?

I am so solitary.  
Time has rotted.  
I’ve tallied the ways  
I’ve loved him—  
each one a blade.  
It was never enough.

Is anything ever enough?  
I am not my progenitor.  
Not a Xerox of dysfunction.  
Not a shrine to inherited ruin.  
Or am I?

I am not right in the head.  
I have been brain-dead.  
Performing rigor mortis.  
Playing dead.

I catch myself praying—  
a reflex from the crypt.  
Then I remember:  
I’ve outgrown superstition.  
But I am resourceful, relic-wise.  
I wield the tools of the damned.  
I carve solace from debris.  
I am not helpless.

Or am I?

I can’t even trace a path  
out of this tar-pit of despair.  
I sit.  
I rot.

I wonder in the night.  
Why did he leave me  
to rot in the night?

Is he cruel?  
Or just half-formed?  
I cannot tell—  
when he whispers love  
like a curse.

I am not feckless.  
Not stupid.  
Not dull.  
But I bowed.  
I bent.  
I broke.  
I was never his equal—  
though he lied like a priest.

Broken word streams.  
Shattered daydreams.  
I stagnate.  
I crush my own spirit—  
a ritual I know too well.  
It’s common.  
It’s expected.

I don’t want to be ordinary.  
Or plain.

Was it hazing?  
A blood rite into his skewered world?  
I hurt beyond phrasing.

Not because I lost him.  
Not because he was never mine.  
But because I betrayed time—  
squandered my existence  
on relationship dysphoria.  
A farce.  
A theft.  
A desecration.

Somebody stop me  
before I do it again.

Gimme gimme gimme shock treatment.  
Institutional silence.  
I refuse to clean my own messes.  
I languish in the regolith—  
moon dust and madness.

I like it that way.  
A glamorous excuse for collapse.  
Pratfall.  
Playing dodgeball with fate.  
Smashing my face  
against the same wall  
in the same room  
in the same hate.

It is obscene—  
the clarity I now possess.  
I see my fault lines.  
I see my stop signs.  
Always blinking red.  
Men like him are harbingers of dread.  
Always weeping in their beds.

I would rather rot in isolation  
than hear another counterfeit lament  
from someone unscarred.  
Someone who hoards pity  
from those of us  
who bleed in silence.

I will not be pitied.  
I will not be plain.  
I will rise—relic-wise—  
from regolith to reign.

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