the way it will go

in my head, it goes away. preening against all that is puritanical in me, seeking absolution amongst the silence carved out by a shipping crate i was slovenly shoved into. i can barely keep my eyes open as every drip echoes through an empty skull. i wanted to keep it. thought it was tangible & mine but ice melts back to embryo in my palm, slipping between the cracks & leaving me with a carton of broken eggs & a shiftless face i must have borrowed but can no longer return because the sender is long since passed on & i am passing on the chance to love again by being the smallest nesting doll in the shell. & it’s not as if i love him or even want to, it’s that i want to prove someone can take me in their palm & not break me open, throttled at the throat & minimized to fingernail clippings & squashed beetle. so it becomes obvious then to choose those incapable of doing either the holding or the breaking. someone i neither want to enmesh nor engrain in my sulfurous heart smoking from the inside out. just taste & swallow & feel satiated until the next meal time rolls around. never a breakfast companion, just a smile across a rented dinner table. nonetheless, i call this avoidance because any sign of legitimate fondness is disastrous in an entombed soul built like an imaginary cask of amontillado. still sometimes i play pretend that he is someone else entirely & well, so am i. a dress up game where he wears my father’s work boots & i wear my mom’s old heels & we spin & pretend we can be someone who can love & someone who can be loved. i write our names on a sheet of paper & draw a straight line connecting the two dots ignoring the distance, both literal & manifest, that keep us from undoing anything. chasing my tail, coming up with teeth bared & no meat between them. starving at the food bowl knowing effort maybe could one day possibly bring home the bacon & the eggs, but knowing that one more failed attempt could just as easily marry me to a grave site i can’t afford & don’t belong to. in my head, it goes a way. i carry too many books & spill like oil in the gulf. & he, enraptured & entranced, reaches out like lightning to the earth. my branches swaying & begging to be climbed. but that isn’t the way it goes. instead the lightning burned me to my roots & soot stained & desperate, i thirsted at the rain fall. i pour into the condensation on the windowsill & know that there is no way it goes other than the way it will go & i can waste all the time on cautiously detached & it won’t make the ending any different than if i flowed into the open & parched mouth of the river. somersaults aside, i know in the end where i am supposed to someday arrive.