Diana Darby ** "I V" ** Intravenous

The Broken

Perhaps,
after all this time,
the problem is me.
I am the one who needs the slap.
The mailbox.
The empty dream again and again,
only to remind myself that pain is real.
I sometimes forget.
But how many times can a person bang their head against the wall
and still not believe it hurts?
Five years?
Ten?
Invisibility is a worm
crawling in the grass
waiting to be caught.
The chicken enjoys the hunt.
The worm,
not so much.
I have been looking at the same wine bottle for years,
too busy to see the cracks in it.
Now, I see them all.
I have been burning myself alive
with lies.
Mine.
Yours.
The New York Times.
Each day I tell myself
believe,
believe.
But believe in what?
In sadness?
In breakfast shells?
In cocoa powder on butcher block tables
waiting to be swept away?
In forests and gulfs and turtles
covered in waste?
In love?
You tell me
how much happiness can be found on t.v.
and under fingernails?
I have tried.
I have tried,
to be
and being is not enough.
Being leaves you stomped upon
by the ugly,
the
hungry, white-toothed animals,
clawing and scraping and snarling their way through this world.
There is no room in this world for the broken.