Saturday, July 30, 2011

You Can't Poke Out Your Mind's Eye

My mother never told me that broken hearts
often feel like swallowing a ice cream cone
covered in ground glass.

At first you barely notice it, except for the slight sting,
but after a while it corrodes your insides, burning
from the stomach out, finding its way into your

bloodstream, swimming through your veins as
it places miniscule puncture wounds in each one
until your body is a sprinkled sky, see through and holey.

I want to scrub the inside of my eyelids, so when I
close my eyes they don't show me a picture of your face,
the skin on your cheeks slightly mottled, the crease above your nose.

Tell me how to cut you from my memories, a nostalgic
lobotomy, that would excise you from the last year, leaving
cut-outs of champagne toasts, crumpled sheets, and tear stained tissues.