​

you’ve stopped going to birthday parties

 

you bite your nails to the beat

of songs on the radio, close your eyes

and wait for the other shoe to drop—

instead, an anvil falls through the ceiling

and lands at your feet.

 

nobody cares whether you’ve made it five days

without thinking of the sea, the bridge, the car.

people call to say i’m sorry, scarcely getting

the words out before they hang up.

 

i’m sorry means that’s too bad, an admission

of the fact that your struggles are those

of an overgrown child, an incompetent adult. 

 

those little sleeping beauties with brushed hair, 

they'll never know what it’s like to be stripped naked, 

to be caught molting, halfway to neurosis,

to be known as the mortifying creature you are—

not someone who throws parties, but somebody

who would leave them twenty minutes in,

the threat of wandering eyes too imminent.

 

you’re entertaining spacemen, airheads, people

who don’t know the difference between the ground

and the wall, the one you hit first and the one

you save as a back-up plan.

 

you can’t talk to people like that, let alone trust them—

people who speak of knives as things that stab the other,

foreign struggles that could never reach their doorsteps.

 

you can’t trust people who don’t spend their lives running—

it’s all right there, in the backyard, behind the streetlight, in your chest. 

 

it’s only you, in the dark, feeling for the light switch,

just as it will be only you in fifty years, still in that room.

 

there may be people watching, but they’re bit parts

in a seventy-year long epic, gentle mouths to kiss

and warm hands to hold but people who,

nonetheless, draw a blank when you ask them

to point to where it hurts.

 

there’s a sink.

there’s a razor.

somebody bleeds.

somebody shaves.

you’re certain of it now.