(the things I am full of)

XIX.

         A pipsqueak collects coins where flat tears fall from my nose and collect at my upper lip to dribble across a bridge of drawn lips and leak through and go inside before they drip down my corrugated chin. The coins are indian paisas that impress my ankle with twos and fives and the pipsqueak is a hiccup that sews together smothered gasps and garage-zene-zinging and the boy tracing the circle the same never the same on my back, sews them together with a softly fraying string of truncated rhythm and cricks in skeletons and gray solitaire cards and a phone message encompassing an extensive hesitation.

         I like to exclaim I don't know when I am sure that finally I am lost and not sure and full of things and sadness for the things that I am full of. I'm scared of one way but love the one-ways I find ragpicking; like I see the blood that leaves my ankle and taste the pain of the laminate floor, assaulted by all our feet, taste the pain in my ankle, draw a softly fraying string that closes the bag most of the way and makes the string longer than the pain in my chest for all the things it's full of. Cellophane floaters drift with my general layout of vision and trim unseen walls in scenes of questioning, of exclaiming I don't know as the hiccup emerges from the union of bitter and sweet, the birth of terrible clarity and detailed confusion, magnificent gray, as the hiccup is also the seam between the two, between the five between the three.

         My hurting head is beginning to burst in the middle because there are no seams or serges, no edges, and my heart aches and hums sweetly with the collective sobbing of innumerable tiny incompletes, complete in every limb: possibilities grieving for birth and lamenting impossibility, lamenting realization enough to know at least their loss, their impossibilities. My chest swells with experiencing. And neither fast nor slow but feeling generally quick my diaphragm squeezes until I find myself casting the idea of weeping, the air of it, preceded by the labor pains of art and the glicking sound of a utensil stirring congealing mac and cheese, preceded by doubts and slightly sticking lips and peeled-off jelly electrodes and recycling bottle caps with chase scenes, casting the air of all of it, a short air, an emptiness devoid of my fullness and what I'm afraid to lose, casting all of it into half a glass of low-calorie lemonade, at the surface of which lies a lifeless fruitfly whose short-statured emptiness and solitude are ready to accompany my jetsam with improbable solidarity.