Day three in the Heartbreak Hall of Fame
and I hear your voice again. Actually,
I pick up the phone and you’re there,
the way God is supposed to wait
on the other side of prayer. How’s it going?
you ask. Appropriately shitty, I say,
glib with a gun to its head. That’s as deep
as we go, surprised to be wading,
tugged by a whirlpool with the frail suck
of a bathtub drain. So how come it hurts
this much? One pain releasing another,
that lifetime supply. Why have I saved
all these Rorschach scars? No wonder
there’s so little new info space.
Full of loss, brown bottles of the stuff,
shelves stacked like a substitute spine.
I can rhyme off the names of every slight,
but can’t recite a single poem.
how’s it going?
It’s stuck like an ankle in a gopher’s hole,
it’s breaking the same old bones.
~ from Love Outlandish, (Brick Books, 2009)
