Bruises

By Christopher Malec

We met at Burger King...                        so I thought I could have us my way

If I had known you were gonna drive through more than once,
I would’ve made the first round a Happy Meal so that we

broke each other’s lust and fell in trust
rather than the other way around

       Dessert                                       should never come first

because see,         we missed some things,


       or never let them out


Like how I never told you I’ve always hated needles
 

So much so,
that at the age of 26,
every time a doctor is about to stick me with one,
I still look away

Not so much out of fear as it is a disdain of being prodded by something sharper than a parent’s reproachful wit

                And every single time they pull the needle,

       for some strange reason I return my glance to find myself slightly bruised


Which confounds me ...

Because it’s not so hard to find these veins which puff like speed bumps at the slightest bit of pressure applied

Not so hard as the pressure applied by you every time you were convinced I lied by the accusations of another

Yet you failed still to see the coagulation of sentiments rise above the senses and form emotional reminisces of the times you left

Or are they the times I left? Because ...

 
Moving at indiscriminately criminal paces
seeking financial safety that skips
the proverbial “GO” without collecting two billfolds
twice,

no wait ...

three times in a row is ultimately a fault of my own,
is it not?

For that I was gifted a measure of your indifference inside a box you can’t take out
        As I sat ...

an envelope would fall through a flap
with your name written on the back ...

Written whispers hinting at visits,
                                        more missives,
                                                 and the chances of you taking me back
                                                                       every time I make it back and ...

Those few times you appeared on the other side of the glass

                                                                 and left handprints behind,

you kept melting my common sense and injecting me with hope ...


       Hope ...                                                 is the lazy man’s drug ...

                 and the guilty man’s religion ...

                                     I should have OD’d on the church steps

With every dose the little traces of you were often caustic,
passing through the vital moments causing emotional cotton fever,

 

Like
the
mother
who
left
for
five
years
and
disappeared

Like
the
other
exes
who vacillate
in
and
out
of
fear
of
holding
on
to
a
dead
man

Like
the
homeboys
who
forget
about
me
until
someone
asks
how
I
am
Like
the
prayed-
to
God
whose
promises
weren't
kept




















        Until it all flowed out in a crimson rage
                                                          through a broken hope’s sharp scope
                                and left spots on my soul, obsidian-tinted violet-blues

                                                                                                           I’m through ...

                                                         Of turning into liquid in your eyes
                                     and falling from the dark cloud in the skies above you,


I stopped waiting for your letters, too
                                                         Instead ...


I call every denial from the court a love letter
and I know you’d ask, “Why?”
I’d just say because Lady Justice never wants to let you go,
she’d rather hold on to you until you grow old
Till death do us part, as if that day in court,
marriage was pronounced ...

She’s one you’d plead and beg to pay alimony to,
to take all you have,
if only you could just leave and be free,
but she’ll keep you in a recycling misery
despite the infidelity she has with two million other justified suckers

 
Marriage ...
is an institution after all.
And leaves you with as much ambition as dog without a tail in a circular room

And so still I sit ...

With a sentence longer than the sun is projected to exist,
so long ago on shooting stars
I ceased making a wish;

I’m struggling to find a space between pure existence
                                                                                  and cold hard dying
 

For lack of a better phrase, we left each
other back there, in that
phase of youth
where impulses rang truth more resonant and deafening
than the thoughts banging against the silence in these cells presently do


And in the same way I haven’t here,
                                                  nor do I feel we’ve escaped our love ...

But I’m tired of teetering on the seesaw between reminiscing

                               and reality

 
I’ve spent so much time trying to grow through this bid,
but a tree planted indoors
will eventually hit a ceiling,
I realized it
when someone once asked me what God was
and I said I wasn’t dense enough to claim to know
but if one exists and created me,
then there’s got to be some essence of it within myself, and I need to search
there for it ...
before I look anywhere else

And I need to tap that power to extricate my soul from this derisive spell, but I don’t want hope’s help
Because hope has become a needle ...
and I’m tired of its bruise
Source: Poetry (February 2021)