Process

All day you pace around a messy apartment, make excuses for the piles of inadequacy, the blank spaces on your word processor, as the darkness curls and winds itself at your spine. You know this game, have played it long enough, it isn't funny any more, I am not laughing anymore please stop. 

On the floor at my feet, piles of poetry flutter out from the typewriter, a reliable stream of blood when you have emptied yourself of tears, I don't have time for a mental breakdown you hear yourself explain across the line but collapses do not ask permission, they enter uninvited, you are pushing yourself and the brink closer together, like children playing house with dolls, will they won't they, you're flirting with disaster, toying with the audience, this post reads like a poem without rhyme

metaphorically, too. 

After my innards run out into a puddle on my sagging wood floor, dripping down the chipped paint on the rickety banister, the room around me lies silent. There's a calm after the storm we rarely mention. It is tired and fragile, unsure of itself and hesitant to step back into the stream, but it is quiet, holds just a morsel of space where something new can grow. 

I step out of the rubble. Dust myself off. Open the last beer in the refrigerator and sort through the piles. 

It wasn't what you had scheduled for your evening. But perhaps there is something of value there to salvage.