Once, We Lived | Poetry Collection Completed

Mine Own

I sewed each stitch
as if it could lift
the weight off my chest
and attach me to
something worth anything.

And you became joined
with the sloppy, jerky
movements of my wrist
and the thread until I
could not tell you apart from me.

I had believed that states,
yes, states, had a cure
that was so simple to design
and easy to execute
that I could not possibly falter.

But, it was as if you were
gangrene, rotting against me,
turning me sallow with
a quick fleshy death that made
me smile with teeth of white maggots.

And the desire to run,
never lessened,
only compacted until it was aerosol,
bursting forth with the strength
of firing machine guns.

My mind had assigned you
to the same status as my own body,
a corpse, perhaps, by the way it
weakened, and it has taken all my will
to pull the thread taut and begin to cut.

The scissors gnaw at the rot,
at the string between them,
and I have never felt such crushing
fear as I have trying to once again
detach. Perhaps to reattach. Perhaps to run.

I never let out a cry,
like an eye to an ear
or a foot to the brain,
to you in my troubles.
Moreover, I had become an extension of you.

Revelations come too late,
I fear, and by the time the last
of the twine snaps, it concerns me
of the flowers, laid over my rictus
in the attempt to beautify.