First Try

Vague, repetitious, harrowing flashbacks –
And wondering if it’ll ever happen again.
Why not?
If it did before and then again,
Even in the mean times and always in the ever after?
Realizing and Rationalizing –
Roller coasters on a roof top during an
External Blizzard
Internal Blizzard
And a flickering cigarette burned straight through that ’78-hour midnight run
To melt them both away…

Perfect, deadly, homemade concoction of paranoia –
Self-hate, despair and so much lost once again.
Defeat sets in
like decay and with no excuses or reasons,
No differentiation between the seasons or those who will
Cry
Tonight because of you.
Like a cavity, you try to fill it,
Drill through it,
the rotten darkness and clean it out.
So it won’t hurt and it won’t pain,
So it won’t sting and it won’t stain.

But it did.

Stamped: RETURN TO SENDER and nothing has changed.
The first dose of healing didn’t take…
But they promise to baptize you
Like new.
They promise to humiliate you into not acting like this and not
Acting like that –
You say it’s working this time and you tell me over and over
why…
this time is not the same and now you understand.

I might as well have been speaking French and writing Braille –
I should have communicated in Swahili and been diagnosed illiterate –
I should have whispered into a disconnected and unplugged phone –
That’s how much you understood.

But I don’t.

It is now.
Only now.
When a blast of biology blessed
A miracle within us?

Was it my lack of tolerance in this recurring role
that sent me into considering alternatives
and kept me reaching for those few scarce moments
During the month
when a space like odyssey can occur?

Anti-biotics. Amoxicillin.
I just wanted to let go.
To ride with no hands.
To act like I didn’t know.
I just wanted to not understand.

But I did.
I do.
I aways have.

Photo Credit © Elizabeth Regen All Rights Reserved