withdrawal

kerrycoxpoetry:

Kicking the kick

with a new type of slick

all my appendages have new appendices

wowed into believing night is not a

verbing word, your

tomorrow skin sucked me in

.

A hospital conversation

whitewashed into submission

gathered into gathers, retreating

into my feathers, thinking

of flying

.

like I did, when you told me

I could, I needed to, like I did

when it was the only choice,

like I did when I imagined birds,

wind, happy thoughts, like

I did when my bones

felt

hollow

.

Now I know your name as

a color, a room, an old lesson

I had forgotten I’d already learned.

Now I keep transparent, my color

is named jellyfish, my heart is hidden

doesn’t even beat the way that

human hearts

Beat.

.

Come rest, I wanted someone to say

Come let me wash the blood away.  In an armored

car I pretended was an ambulance, made my own

siren like a song my lips just knew.  A hymn to

a deity I couldn’t imagine yet.  Still can’t. 

.

I heard you carried an invisible knife,

saw the bandaged girls laughing

nervously, quiet otherwise.  Remembered

blues my blood played down the veins

and opened the floodgates

just in case.

.

Kicking the kickstand, setting up shop

inside my worn down wonderland

wondering why wondering is

so much like unencumbering

and writing you off

is so unbecoming.

.

I remember all the notes my small fingers

fingered on a rented clarinet, all the ways

I learned not to mention the injuries

hidden in your sleeves, that our mailbox

was a mile down the road from our house.

.

And how it felt to take

someone else’s letters

read them sitting in the gravel

and put them back carefully. 

This is one of them.