Irritating the Balm

You have your good calls and your bad ones. So do I. The mediocre funerals that all moments are. The headlights in your stare fixed on my tail. Everything dying to let us live. Or show us how we might. The sun like paint thinner through the slats in the vertical blinds. Washing away the colors until the everything is bare. In my one moment. In my one real birth. There were bruises, but no blood. There was screaming, but no women. Only angry boys and shy girls. Finding out they weren't as old as they thought they were.

We say it's over, but we never really mean it. Stepping off of the wheel. The haphazard pottery of circumstance. Pulled out of the kiln breakable, but not broken. We say it's over, but we don't surrender to it.

We say we're okay. Because that's what we think they want to hear. Apply the ointment. Drowning in the medicine. We say we're okay. Because what else can I do. He wants to hear it. Hell, maybe I am. Even.

Okay.

Close enough to the eclipse to go blind. But thankful I had the chance to see it.

Me?

I admit.

I'm only alive when I'm dying. And I still wish sometimes you could kill me again.