the red paint on the wall of the parking garage makes me think of him. it drips downward, filling in the cracks in the cement; all i can see are fingerprint-sized splotches trailing all the way to the floor.
before the lightning struck he told me that blood was his favorite substance because it reminded him that there were things living inside him, things that he could not bear to kill.
i wondered if he crashed the car to make sure that there were also things inside me that shouldn't die.
and in the darkness i fear
that the scalpel will slice through my skin
and pierce my organs
like it did my brother's
but i am not sick.
the doctors will play with my heart
and toss it around,
bounce it off the wall
[hotpotatohotpotatohot]
until it tires of beating:
it will go to sleep
just as i am trying to wake up.
and those women in white,
scrubbing bedpans
and whistling in the night
aren't doing a damn thing to stop it,
but neither am i
as i lay incomplete on this stiff bed
so who can they blame
when my eyes don't open?
they point out the dime-sized bruises
lining my chest,
remnants of the time the doctors pressed too hard
when they were trying to
force air into my collapsing lungs
[or maybe when the bones
smashed into the dashboard];
they say it was you, it was you
who didn't fix this
like you said you could --
it was you who let the sutures sit stagnant
on the surgical tray instead of sewing them into her skin.
but they were just oh-so-confused when my sapphire blood
didn't turn ruby as it collided
with the oxygen in the room:
tiny drop-like sparkling gems spilled from the hole in my chest
as they shook their heads:
another catastrophe,
could you call this dead?
but i don't think she was real
in the first place.
[well, even if she was
i don't think she would have cared
or else she would have
cried through the morphine,
broken the barrier between us all]
and i am screaming above
i was not sick,
i was not dying:
i was not living,
but i didn't ask for this
but nobody can hear over the shrill noise screeching [deaddeaddead]
and the squeaking of a cart taking a bloodied body down to the morgue.
oh, tell what you will to the dying,
let the painkillers speak the rest;
when they're gone, fill a thin vase with flowers
and pretend that they have been blessed.
Author notes
i don't think this makes sense, really. i don't know why i wrote it.
i just hadn't written anything in a while. it's delete-able.
i want to enter this contest that a friend has just started [and i will, hopefully]
but this was not good enough for it [or for her].
Whatever you want to say. Critiques, anything. :)
Comments
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oh man you give me chills.this is...gorgeous,yup gorgeous and beautiful.i think ive told you this before but you got so much talent.you amaze me with your words every time.i am a fan.
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if the goal of writing is to stir up emotion and tug at heart strings (which I believe it is, to some extent), then your work is amazingly successful. as with all your other poems, this one threw me into a vivid visual that picked my heart rate up a bit. I love your use of bracketed phrases, Stephen King was the first writer I ever saw use that type of stylistic approach and I always felt like it spoke to me. I also love your use of alliteration. You use it so well.
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ooh...
"but they were just oh-so-confused when my sapphire blood
didn't turn ruby as it collided
with the oxygen in the room:
tiny drop-like sparkling gems spilled from the hole in my chest
as they shook their heads:
another catastrophe,
could you call this dead?
but i don't think she was real
in the first place."
-
"oh, tell what you will to the dying,
let the painkillers speak the rest;
when they die, fill a thin vase with flowers
and pretend that they have been blessed." - Haunting. Beautiful. It's so hard to explain how much I felt while reading this. It was painful, and it was everything I wanted to read write now.
Wonderful write.
This is truly brilliant writing.
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