Bones

A Poem

It starts with the shakes,

the feeling of oversensitivity

and numbness

all at once.

It’s the hallucination

of being doomed

no matter what decision you make.

The therapy sessions that are held on Mondays,

for an hour to

diagnose a problem

that was your mother’s fault.

No matter what he says

you take it with a grain of salt.

Like the men who threw you down

underneath a bus

covered with lies and broken promises.

You tell him that you’ve been clean,

that you haven’t craved for a while;

instead, he looks at you as though he knows

what’s next.

It’s your bruised and smoked out lungs

after cigarettes and blunts,

both before and after sex.

It’s the shame and disappointment of having to

face that same worn-out nurse

and a liaison officer

in the ward after one too many pills.

My bones shake and rattle on this Earth,

it begs to be held still

despite how much angst it holds

inside my chest.

It longs to be held into the deep Earth

with flowers to romanticize

the tragedy of my existence.

Broken bottles, pills, powders, and sex

each chapter of my life

can only be represented by these.

They mark the downfall of how

slowly my skin will

peel away from my bones

as I lay down in the Earth

with sunflowers in my hand.