I am still here, bloody and
picking my teeth out of the gutter
still wearing my grandmother’s necklace
the one she made out of piano wire and neglect and
never properly tuned
it sounds somewhere on the scale between forgetting and forgiveness,
depending on the temperature, the humidity,
the barometric pressure of doubt, etc.
but it never quite fit me and
I will probably hock it soon
and my mailbox is overflowing with love letters and pipe bombs and
rejection slips and
those poems about fault lines
all the overblown formulations that never could pin down and describe
the clumsy wild trembling of a human heart
or the need for matter to burst and blow itself apart
momentarily seduced by entropy and the finality of doom
easily half of those packages are stamped
“RETURN TO SENDER”
but my delicate eyes don’t recognize my handiwork
and those rhyming couplets and complex fuses
strike me as too dangerous to defuse
besides, my fingers are broken
swollen and blushing with violence
I couldn’t disarm a tea kettle now
last night I hammered out every fleshy digit
trying to nail down my new theory
concerning the arithmetic of loss
this morning I managed to fashion ten crude splints from the debris
what little I could salvage out of the wreck we left behind:
some wooden popsicle sticks that you compassionately sucked all of the chocolate flavored splinters from – thoughtfully leaving the knock-knock jokes intact, somehow (thank you!)
cotton I tore from the comforter we made into a canvas and covered heroically with broad sloppy strokes of sweat and cum and grit teeth, our endless exuberance and so much cheap wine
the electrical tape we jokingly bought when the pills lost their efficacy and even dying seemed played out and hopeless
hoping we might finally bind the faulty wiring of our brains with a material we could feel between our fingers and tear up with our teeth
all of the rainbow-colored thread from the sewing kit your older sister gave you
that year you finally crawled out of bed after a whole savage month spent speaking only of scars
and gravity wells
crying radical new theories into pillowcases
about the physical properties of light and the definition of obtuse
and I’ve buried these purple-casket hands of mine
inside the mittens you knit for me that winter
when the cold marched in like a conquering army
and warmth was so fucking hard to come by
I remember wearing them every morning in the kitchen
fumbling to make the coffee without the free play of my fingers
never once regretting the mess or trouble caused
it was that same winter you tilled the soil of my self for three days straight
your feverish tongue raking through muck until you found all the better parts of me
and finally explained through exhausted, enthusiastic tears how you were planting a garden in there, how you wished for me to bloom
the dent is still in my side from where you wrenched your foot into my ribcage
and earnestly pried your muddy teeth from the collapsed mineshaft of my throat,
all those greasy fluids of love gushing onto the carpet with your relieved squealing laughter
I am laughing now, too, but in a different way
I guess it’s just funny how far away some things can seem…
here, from the lopsided seat of my grandfather’s recliner,
where after surviving two wars and three children
he finally succumbed to the violent plague of day-to-day
and smoked and drank himself into an ambulant grave,
I pause for a moment to ponder the staggering mass of stars
and the impossible heights of
absurdity
from where I sit, I am starting to perceive living
as carrying an incalculable weight
down an unlit staircase of hushed instability
struggling to balance each fragile moment,
every choice and attenuate consequence,
with no light switch, no railings,
and untold miles of snagging nails
it all seems so unreal to me
I suppose I know all that I owe
to trajectory
to chance
to fear
to the chorus of crashing of branes
which is nothing at all,
and plenty never could be
but there is this sense
that there is something I still owe you
some price I have yet to pay
in a currency I have not discovered
I will keep searching
in the meantime,
here is hoping
that this
may count for something