remember, had i been
imprisoned there, i'd have been nothing you could
have salvaged from the junk drawer like a rubber
band or a cigarette lighter or a roach clip:
i am immaterial, a ghost. i am still there. for
too long you thought you'd kept me hidden, confined
in oak/ always opened for you but
what about those nights you denied me both food
and lips when the water seeped up through the
carpet and made the air rank so that we could
not smell each other
or else those mornings i never told you about
andhow, shaky-fingered, i opened the medicine
cabinet and found myself sitting there, miniature,
in between bottles of valium,
eyes sewn closed, boy scout knot round my neck
and still so in love. what about confinement and
the inevitable revolt: bird from the gilded cage,
Pygmalion's fair-haired nightmare.
there are these things and also this: i am fatal.
i am that hardened and impenetrable pillar of
sodium chloride which you mistook for clay, your
fingers itching to make me Be |
