London Bridge

These days I’m spiking skulls
up on the bridge of my mind
as a warning to myself.
It’s another lesson I’m not learning

when I’m standing in front of you
trying to explain without words
that I don’t love you.
Not like you love me.
And I can’t keep apologizing for it.

I’m hoping maybe you’ll just understand
and it will keep you quiet.
For once, you’ll realize it
and with a degree of decorum, close
your mouth and let this moment, if nothing else, pass.

Darling, I’m just saying it’s been too much of this lately
and I can’t remember what I was like when we talked of other things.
Do you understand I have been screaming
through my rag doll smile all this time?

But these skulls I’m putting up are for me,
rotting faces, eyes leaking pus, slack unwanted jaws.
They are treachery and deceit. They are theft, lies. They are mutiny.
They are a hung through the fog of my mind so I’ll remember
that I alone am allowing this.
It’s a tax paid in full.
I’ve got a scar on my thumb,
to remind me of the time I slipped the hangman’s noose
so many lifetimes ago.

My heart is clockwork,
it requires mending, gears, and the minding to
I haven’t time to worry about yours.
And maybe, it’s not as dramatic as all that.
But I am tired of being in the back of your head,
floating like the potential you should have thought better of.

My bones are soggy, my muscles stretched thin,
I am tried of walking the edge of this island
just to avoid this stupid poem.
To avoid marking on paper what I hear in the ticking of my heart,
what you hear late at night
when you can’t sleep
what the ghosts have been telling you for decades
if you ever bothered to listen.