cutting great neck

she sat me down
in the living room
outside the light was blue
and it came
in small strokes, like wind
blowing over meadows.

the room fell in a cool hush,
after she told me
what she had called me in for:
then, i slumped in my seat
as if somebody died
(and inside, somebody did die)
and i nursed myself into an internal
tantrum, and i thought
no no no no no no no no
(please no)

and like a pistol’s trigger pulled
tears sprang and levitated there
in the clouds of my skull,
and the rhythm of my thoughts
fell away into a thumping
as incessant
as silence.

...tell me it
is not true.
please, tell me,
it cannot be true!

but like a nightmare
that you feel should not have been a nightmare,
one that only you
could so utterly fear,
her words compressed in my mind
and created a brain of its own.

thump, thump,
it said,
thump.
a voice that
apologized for its words,
but in vain

i gazed away,
towards
the street
(that street, home, it seems
as if you still belong to me,
as it always feels when we leave you)
so she would not see me cry.

walls i hoped i’d leave willingly one day
closed into us,
each white streak of paint
inching towards the pulling gravity
that spilled into the space between her words
and my unseen, unheard cries.

(thump, thump, thump,
each word filling itself full like
a decomposing garbage dump),
the trees
wavered in the winter waft,
their branches clambering and
quivering like a heart
that stopped living, but had not yet
passed on.

when i ran up the stairs
i wrote an essay
and a rant,
and a cry and a cry
and i wrote myself a cry,
a sob i had to compose
like a mind thinking itself dry, i did not stop
for anyone or anything
but only for my own mind
to fleetingly die

my window
turned up bare brown branches,
each twig finger kissing the glass pane
as if to comfort, or
to say goodbye.