dummy

Failing the math like a blind woman,
here’s your hole in the head, your bloody lung…
breath… one second in the room… two seconds in the room… the room
taken up, with all that you carried in
spread out over you, over the bed…

yr hypos and yr towels, yr needle, the diary
with its one or two or fifty new pages of verse…
the dog-eared book you stopped reading
at page two-hundred and twenty…
now you’ll never know what happened to… Jim… Noah…
Bill the therapist who wanted to lobotomize his dear baby girl

…because you didn’t get up, you got shot,
you got shot when you didn’t let them, didn’t let them
have the matchbook you were clutching in yr left hand,
the little razor. You held these up as if they were the last
things you would reach for, would need in that room…

and they didn’t save you… they didn’t stop it… No…
yr blood crept up in the mirror…

…and we licked it …we licked it all up …didn’t we