A POEM A DAY

When the blender blade I left out on the kitchen sink
grabbed onto my skin like a midnight conviction,
I could not refute its symbolism.
Sloppy universe, I smile to myself
while the steel burnished
dagger grins, bedaubs the taut tarp
that keeps me buried within.
The crimson song hurries out
just
deep enough, I witnessed
the white breakable body beneath me
adulterate
puncture 

picture this: the entirety of my essence exits
from simple exposure.
You should know,
I concentrated the blood until it dried like plums
until aplomb is all I would ever become,
ablaze by the harvest moon, conflagration
of certitude, long overdue, all this belief
no longer absconding but leaving the body
alas, turning blue flame true.
Imbued by the imperative nature of my own leaking,
the thin tissue, indignant at the incessancy
is now a precursor of how I’ve come to be. A leaving
behind of what makes me lighthearted
suffice to say there is a surplus of
ordinary sadness in whatever I say
whether it be silent or amplified,
there is a history of empty
staying alive.

There are an inordinate amount of words to describe leaving the body
but they all lead to empty, a extinct future of eventually, this is the kind
of goodbye no one likes to memorize, you know,
the kind of death that spring performs
the erasure of winter,
dead trees
daring to be great
when even the air they make
turns against them, their bodies
forgotten. My body forgets its make up
all the time.

You should know, when I saw the bare minimum of me,
my own blood was all that I could think of, leaving, cells
succumbing to oxygen, color by breath,

the radiance of it—

This sounds improbable, and it probably is
if you’re anyone but me but you should know
how I stopped the bleeding, the leaving.
I wrote L-O-V-E in blood on paper,
watched the trees swallow the plums
in seconds, and just stared at the only thing
that’s ever left me and still spoke love
and let it last.

Let it be the last of me.
Oh please if I am not to last,
when I am empty—
please dispose of me
properly.