“Hospital”
Everything feels well-rehearsed when it shouldn’t. One word sets everything off like water rippling at the slightest touch of a finger. Clothes in a bag, a book for company, my heart in the deepest pocket. I know exactly what to bring, what to expect. There is calculated alarm, an undercurrent pushed further back in favor of rationality, of coldness. My face is on autopilot — smiles for everyone else, a line for others, a mask for myself. I am walking as fast as my feet could carry me through the sights and sounds so familiar. Through beeps and polite whispers, through the harsh white lights. I am walking as fast as my pocket would let me even as it threatens to burst at the seams.
But I am never fast enough.
Blogspot: Undercurrent
Sometimes it’s easier not to explain. Days have been strings of “What’s it like without her?” or “Do you ever miss her?” or ”Why are you so stoic?” Questions I never warrant answers to, because well, what can I say? I mean, what the hell could I say to What’s it like without her?
Blogspot: Dead End
I see you in between spaces of darkness.
I keep collecting pieces of you. Everywhere. (Where is just a matter of time, a matter of circumstance, a matter of remembering.) Some days finding you is a happy thing, on most days I wish I could just… wander away. Forget. Deny the collection.
But I always keep them under careful lock and key — in an inconspicuous box beside my mug of pencils and my cups of coffee. Sometimes I lay them out piece by piece, organizing and reorganizing them until I get some semblance of wholeness. Until I’ve rearranged the story into one that’s believable and present and good, but only always fleetingly so.
And it came to me then that every plan
Is a tiny prayer to father time
As I stared at my shoes in the ICU
That reeked of piss and 409
And I rationed my breaths as I said to myself
That I’ve already taken too much today
As each descending peak on the LCD
Took you a little farther away from me
Away from me
Amongst the vending machines and year-old magazines
In a place where we only say goodbye
It stung like a violent wind that our memories depend
On a faulty camera in our minds
And I knew that you were a truth I would rather lose
Than to have never lain beside at all
And I looked around at all the eyes on the ground
As the TV entertained itself
‘Cause there’s no comfort in the waiting room
Just nervous pacers bracing for bad news
And then the nurse comes ‘round and everyone lift their heads
But I’m thinking of what Sarah said
That love is watching someone die
So who’s gonna watch you die? So whos gonna watch you die
