tin cup
We all drank from one tin cup, crowded together like wrist bones. Five years. I look up over the foot of your bed. I can't tell you - he - I can't tell you - he said - he said he'd go to jail and - and you'd stop being my mommy and I'd never see anyone again!
So, when the walls bend back so I cannot recall this my ears dry up shut down I reach under skin for a signal I'm spilling - I'm right here - right here - no, I'm there - shake the water of this coat, buckled under the acid bath - splashed out a shatter glass song over asphalt and wet garbage - cold compress to the chest stretch head back against cinderblock and brick back back get the fuck away! and this liquid rushes to the scene of the disaster - spin me out - crank it - floor it - crunch my head - sew this up - shut it down - blast it- crashing in coming down going down on falling in on failing - break open glass pane with skull there's got to be more air out there - I'm desperate.
Standing at the foot of your bed sixteen years later I have something to tell you and I tell you and you just close your eyes. Forty minutes later you open your eyes and all you can say is how much you've loved raising all of us kids. I'm spun back inside this scream where my bones become metal and my tongue is wired down to my teeth, these trees laugh their many green hands toward me - the floor undulates - fabric squirms against my leg - two large speakers - one for each ear like big spoons to feed this ache - scrape me clean of desire - throttle the delicate bones inside my head - crouched against a flaking wall, braced to the plaster - I reach under at the edge of the wire - I'm right here. I am standing at the foot of my antiseptic, metal-frame bed in the wack-out ward again. You both just cry and cry and I'm the spilt milk and I'm the mother now but I've gone numb. I've got a feeling it's coming back to me. There the skull and within the bone the being swims, an imploded ruined beast. Fear crouches in the pit and howls and mews. I turn away and trip up the street like a nervous laugh at a local bar.
ALL WRITING ©RAZOR 1996.
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