Something Shiny

A dark kitchen in a crowded place

A series of figures snipped out of paper

Spanning out in front of me then

wrapping around my neck

Jagged little edges around oval heads

The length varies the hair varies but in the kitchen in the dark at the party where you are

where you are for the first time in months,

all the bodies look the same.

Sleep cues the chorus of a thousand greeting mouths

A thousand coiling hands in that valley of my back

And I wish I could find myself when I was fourteen
and kick myself in the face.

Track myself down to the cusp of the inlet

At the edge of the gravel at the end of my jog

And push myself into the water.

Myself when I was fourteen

and content to be destroyed.

Waiting for the ocean vacuumed up

For a swing set ground to chalk

Sitting in dramatic places, imagining the chunks of them

The morsels discarded in the wake of some satisfactory atrophy.

Because I thought then that I knew then

that sadness was a tunnel-

a link from one place to the next.

That sadness was a cellophane wrap of circumstance

and with probing fingernails I could release the innards

from their wicked sealed constraint

I could pluck out something shiny.

And here I'm looking into a dust that will not rediscover form,

Being forced into the understanding

That sometimes love, when fastened to loss, is not cathartic.

That sometimes destruction breeds only

Irrelevance.

In a dark kitchen in a crowded place

I struggle with a wrapper to distract myself from you

From you from you from you and your cheerful disregard-

The projection of your smirk on all the paper dolls.

The wrapper nags at my hands, catches at my teeth and finally slices open.

I navigate the inside edge but cannot find its contents

And I know now what I know now what I don’t want to know now

That sadness is the pocket of air

inflating all that I could have sworn 

was solid.