The loss of love caramelizes into shoulder aches -
just a loosened grip.
"Sad?"
Like love,
I've been losing words like that
for months.
As I shed diction,
I find feeling
in my body.
Not sad: my throat and tear ducts prickle,
just priming up the animal.
Not angry: just my clacking teeth,
fresh heaviness in feet and hands
hoping to swing.
Not happy: just gin-warmth;
just sun-warmth.
Lacking certain terms, I can't talk about
the wake of your divorce,
your busy schedule.
Like dying my hair blonde.
I chopped it all off, cheaply gilded it.
"What is it like?"
Not good.
Not bad.
I lost my lips
with the change of color.
I now have the facial distinction
of an electric outlet -
granted
an electric outlet
looking a little
like Marilyn Monroe.
A whole mouth,
gone.
Just like I lost some language
when I started feeling.
I didn't realize how I had shattered myself
just to talk to other people.
I keep my no-lips zipped
and rest my shoulder blades.
Without words on them,
now my feelings can change.
Even caramelize.
3 comments:
Powerful poem, S.! A great meditation on the difficulties/limitations of language and the vastness of experience. Like many of your poems, this was very reflective and melancholic, but (also like many of your poems) I find the ending to be, in its reserved and subtle way, uplifting.
Thanks, D! :)
[Sometimes I don’t know if I’m having a feeling]
Matthew Siegel
Sometimes I don’t know if I’m having a feeling
so I check my phone or squint at the window
with a serious look, like someone in a movie
or a mother thinking about how time passes.
Sometimes I’m not sure how to feel so I think
about a lot of things until I get an allergy attack.
I take my antihistamine with beer, thank you very much,
sleep like a cut under a band aid, wake up
on the stairs having missed the entire party.
It was a real blast, I can tell, for all the vases
are broken, the flowers twisted into crowns
for the young, drunk, and beautiful. I put one on
and salute the moon, the lone face over me
shining through the grates on the front door window.
You have seen me like this before, such a strange
version of the person you thought you knew.
Guess what, I’m strange to us both. It’s like
I’m not even me sometimes. Who am I? A question
for the Lord only to decide as She looks over
my résumé. Everything is different sometimes.
Sometimes there is no hand on my shoulder
but my room, my apartment, my body are containers
and I am thusly contained. How easy to forget
the obvious. The walls, blankets, sunlight, your love.
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