Poem 204 – What She’s Doing To Me

What She’s Doing To Me

“I know the days are offering me only murder for my future.” pg. 5, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart

She comes at me in a flurry of assaulting adjectives
She whips adverbs like wet switches on the shadows of my skin
the tender spots that don’t get attention and don’t want it anyway

This language of hers: a frothing devastation superfluous with
the slow death of the dagger-dressed hallways of cursed love

I’ve been there – crawling twisted & torn
shucked like a slimy oyster
my pearl crammed in the tear duct
of an eye that never weeps

She drags me in the tunnel
panting & pleading punctuating its walls
with the cruel voice of silence that speaks
in dread & deadly desire

Look what she is doing to me!
Sabotaging the foggy joy
in this dirty-cotton-sky day
piercing holes in the deeply buried
pandoras of my past

She tells me – openly
needingly about love that lives to kill her
how she bows into its halitosis mouth
because she has no choice & I have
no choice but to honour her turbulent torture

We are swaddled in each other’s extraordinary
expressions of literary excavations
It’s excruciating

and I’m only on page twenty-three
I’m burning
What will be left of me?
Of us?

Thank you, Jane Christmas, for recommending I read Smart’s books/writing. This poem is dedicated to you…and Elizabeth.