Shrapnel

She left pieces of her life behind her everywhere she went. It’s easier to feel
the sunlight without them, she said. – Brian Andreas

..

This poem is
my missing pieces.
The grief. The shame.
The same small dreams
I drowned in my own
salt. The regrets, the
frets and troubles,
the doubletalk and
triple-white-washed
lies. The futile tries
and the fruitless flail.

This poem is
a kite tail of ribboned
rage and page after
page after page after
page of words spilled
to will my shredded heart
to beat again.

It’s shard and
shred and wedge and
slab and slice
and scrap of
this
and
that;
some old photographs,
a tattered note. A rote
memory, rearranaged
to resemble something
that might someday

………….{sing.}

This poem is a thing
that no one sees, a tree
in a forest of too many
fallings and not enough
ears, the fear behind the
eye of the needle, the
center of the storm.

It’s warm
in its own bright blood,
a crimson trail of murmur
-murdered gore; more guts
than glory,
but enough stories
for a wayward sky.

This I,
this me,
this what’s-left we,
she’s streamlined
you see. Smaller.
Spit-shined. More
refined.

 

 

..
Prompted by Poetic Asides.