True Crime

 

My bandaid, limp and detached,

spiraled atop tepid bath water;

 

In the gauze, a Rorschach bloodspot,

an image of my insides.

 

I toweled off in the cold,

becoming a caricature of myself;

 

Some approximation,

an echo, an imprint,

the residue of memory.

 

I costumed myself in pajamas and began floating from room to room.

 

“What the hell am I even doing?” I wondered.

 

It was the ache of something lost,

the imbalance of something misplaced:

 

Phantom pains and daydreams,

cigarette ash on the floor.

​

Goddamn the narrator in my head;

everything intellectualized to the point of abstraction.

 

The burden of story.

 

I longed to return to the time before language.

 

Unadulterated, pure,

visceral like bone marrow,

the metallic taste of blood.

​

What if I had moved?

What if I had tried something different?

 

Such questions only hurt.

 

What could have been.

 

So I closed the blinds as if to delay the day,

to stop the passage of time.

and in this, I took refuge because

 

in the dark, I felt more like me.

 

I sunk into the couch, chain-smoking, one after another,

deep breathing through a cigarette,

because I didn’t know what else to do.

 

I turned on the TV:

 

More regurgitated violence on the screen, “true crime” programing, death fetishized to sell adds.

 

Abductee, locked in a trunk, clawing at the metal, till her fingernails bled.

 

The irony of it all is that,

 

no one wants to live more than the dying:

 

And this

is something

I could understand.