coping...

You have knocked the life out of me,

I shovel dead things into my mouth

but I only taste the fermented stuff.

Honesty looks good on me, but on you?

I didn't need to know how easily

you put me out of your mind.

You made me feel alive and I hate

to think how long ago that was now,

I want to quicken myself but it does not come,

I can not come, it is an exercise in friction and

though the flesh is willing the mind is freaked.

Reject, side dish, bit of fun, reject,

slut, tease, reject; words bicycle in my head.

Dead mould, mushrooms for tea.

Yes, on the side, by the pallid fish flesh.  I will

shrivel up in the non-weight of your disregard.

This time, can I make the silence stick?

Can I pour in enough alcohol to make

me tongue tied and not voluble? 

Bitter exudations, oozing failure, and

in the morning, sweet rancid sweat. 

Success and failure both are counted

by apathy, not talking to you. 

Your life goes on, maybe to her you will

seem a little distracted, maybe? 

Maybe not even that, after all, she didn't

even notice when you went to her,

rubbed raw from our exertions. 

I try another tentative rub, but no,

rejected by my own flesh.  To drink

to sleep; to sleep perchance to weep.

You have knocked the life out of me,

and now half digested dead things

come back out of my mouth.





Also published at The Camel Saloon

next poem-->