December 26, 2010 - 12:35 p.m.
I knew it was over the moment I felt your fingers close around my throat,
applying physical pressure where I had been forcing life to keep coursing for the past year of our dead-end relationship.
as you applied slow force to the place where my pulse beat relentlessly
i watched your face with a strange calm
like a fly
fluttering it's wings, without moving
consumed before i realized where the poison had entered.
In my head I had been flying away for months, but found
each time i would hit the end of some silvery, sticky thread
that I bounced back each time your world shook with some new tremor of need
I have been caught by you
allowed and condoned by my own immobile heart,
maimed, just the way you liked it,
like each before me,
a semblance of freedom, in the mind
unable to leave without the limbs,
still caught and tearing with each attempt to extract myself
caught like so many good intentions to leave, behind your teeth, afraid to break you, lest I break myself,
so torn up and tied
wrapped in these jaws and levers
I auger my heart, to let drain the fluids
moving, like liquid, between past and present, then, now
and screaming like steam escaping the thin gap between the lid and curved edge
I walked that fine, curved edge
flirting with a boiling point
where I romanticized the burns of hearts beating and breathing
and forgetting, as they raced eachother, quickening, like prey in a death race,
which one of us would succumb?
I should have been the fox,
you so loyal,
but should too
have known that your ultimate goal,
instinctively
was to close that hold
around my neck
choking the life from me
reveling in the softness, the vulnerability, my red coat, not a flag to your bull,
but the slow leaking of love
from every surface you broke
inside and out
my heart, now limp, playing dead
to the world that knew us
who saw us run,
complicitly,
together
towards thorns and sharp objects
wild eyed and full of hope
a short run
turned into years.
It should have ended there
that first time you slammed the car door, screaming and shaking me by the arms
or in the pool where I heard your voice slice through me
you knew
as certainly has the holes in our wall
witnessed, the slow death
you had tried to turn my head away
to pretend you could not see the mechanism inside yourself
ready to snap,
ready to snap
snap.
I am caught,
but would rather
chew my own limb off
than live
like this.
