Poetry Forum

From a mouthful of this morning’s eggs,
I pull bits of char from yesterday’s breakfast.
‘I had no chance to scrub the pan’, I plea with myself-
But I still envision smashing it over my skull
like a cartoon.

Every morning I wake up
feeling last night’s feelings,
thinking last night’s thoughts,
about what’s happening 10 years ago,
and what happened tomorrow.
If you add up every
simultaneous
suffocating
moment
I fight through-
just to say:

‘i love you’

It would stretch for longer than I’ve known you,
which is longer than I’ve been alive.

There was no ‘today’ in my broken egg.
No difference between coming or going,
to an automaton in purgatory
who saw life through the pinhole eyes
of a cardboard mask won at a birthday party
I never asked for.
The sky looked like the ceiling of a small, dark closet.
and flowers looked like plastic bargain bin decor
coated in lead paint, the kind left on roadside graves.
I used to count those as a child,
on the way to destinations
I still dread my arrival to.

If I were brave enough to show you my awe and my terror
of loving the one who revealed
the world as something real, all this time-

I would sink face down into dirty bathwater
choking on wet, laughing sobs
until my fingerprints wrinkled away
and tear at my clammy skin
until my soft nails bent backward
and paint red bruises all over my trembling body
that would spell out a primitive language
neither of us had the chance to learn.

This is my best guess:

‘i am just a bad thing that happened
a book of false memories and blind feelings.
You are a very fast reader,
You’ll soon reach the end of me.’

I remember drawing a map in crayon
of every ditch I saw myself lying in
strange, unnatural positions.
Like I'd been struck by a car,
and someone shoved my body out of the way
so I wouldn’t mess up the next one.