Straw

Straw

I had ripped all of it down
Folded the tape back on itself
The thought of doing it all again
Never crossed my mind, how
naïve of me.  It couldn’t have been
any more than a year, and then again
and then again.

Until the tape was thicker
than the photographs,
the quotes that made me think
of a home.  When I never had one.

I had ripped all of it down. The first time.
Layered it in a box? Or a suitcase?
The act of doing so repeated until
I couldn’t remember which.

She was last.  Laid gently down in cloth
Like a body into a casket.  I wonder
who has that job, and if they are as careful
as I was with her porcelain face.  I pray
that it’s a human, and not a machine,
who lays the dead to rest atop their satin sheets.

I wrapped her, over and over; each layer
precaution after precaution.  I wouldn’t take
any chances with her parted lips, a woman
who made beauty famous.  Molded. Blonde.
She was the center-piece.  A protrusion.


I didn’t guess but I should have, after everything.
Seeing the slivers of china embedded in the folds
of stuffed animal limbs and summery blouses.
I was skin-less, home-less, help-less.  I needed
something breathing to blame.  Something to blame
for more than just the colored dusty remains
but for the fact that she was in there in the first place;
the fact that I was in that hotel room, across the ocean,
across the country, 8 hours but what felt like 8 years
away from the wall that she was supposed to hang from
away from the man who lended me the cigarette
that I glued limply to her mouth so she could come to life
away from the dog who never thought she was real
I needed someone to blame who was more tangible
than the careless baggage handlers and
security personnel of an airport too far gone.
And she was the one lingering over my shoulder
watching me and telling me to give her up,
stop trying to piece the bigger parts together
stop sobbing uncontrollably
stop making everything harder than it had to be.
She was so busy scrounging around for a trash bag
that she didn’t see how bad it hurt me. 
She was the one I chose responsible for the final straw;
the one that broke me.  Turned me into a camel;
an ugly metaphor.  A bellowing, fisted, autonomous
being.  Flinging my frustrations around the room.
Hoping my body would find a way to hurt itself
without me having to tell it to.  Wishing I was on
the 10th floor, instead of the first, so that I could have an eternity
to think of her face, whole again.
Think of her face, the whole way.
The whole way down.