Butcher

I’ve become a butcher of words

Bloody cadavers that scream in pain

Then pass out for hours

Half-dead, half-alive

I used to believe I was actually a surgeon, words that laid out a symphony in laser-precision

Margins of error that created the irony

As I laid next to the window, it looked to me like God’s eternal breath fogged up the glass

Old Man Winter chopped up the wind, choked the sky,

It was a static, warm, blistered gray-blue

I felt choked

I no longer put down the right words in the correct manner

Whirls of mistakes that made the dragonfly’s trajectory land straight in the spider web.

These words make up a dream of you

But that dream is lost to the fragments of my damaged poetry

A story that cannot synch into reality

These roots of myself that are bloodied by a second-hand knife that is dull, rusty and bent

Second-guessed slices that create overlapped days that feel like they are on a loop

I am butcher of my life

Having someone butcher my psyche into altered pieces that do not fit in a sane world

Did I let them butcher myself too thinly

Too cleanly

That now that the gory story is out

And all is revealed, guts, blood and tears

That it really doesn’t matter to anyone

I can’t let the butchering be my definition

But then if that isn’t it

And my trauma isn’t what made me

Then it is my words that make up my image

Ripping out glands, nerves, iron filled blood

Old Man Winter chopped up the wind, choked the sky,

It was a static, warm, blistered gray-blue

I felt choked

My roots came spilling out

Dark-chocolate romantic violet sky that poured like sweltering tea in my cup

I drank it in as a tonic that made me remind myself of that rich, painful, hopeful poetry that everyone seemed to understand

All the human history in every song, verse, book, painting, picture and diary

Every word calls out to all of you

My every word

Calls

Out to you.