Broken

 

“But every conversation has to break

 

somewhere”

 

Those are the words that were laying in wait,

enjoying the camoflauge

of the rest of that poem

and all the other works on all the other pages

in Poetry magazine, dated May, 2005.

 

They were patient, those words.

 

They were sitting improbably

gathering dust

on the shelf of a Good Will:

They were propped up between copies of

 

Johnathin Livingston Seagull 

and Reader’s Digest Condensed Version of Call of The Wild.

Those words were counting on my wife

knowing me and loving me enough to see them and bring them home

 

I don’t know if they were waiting in ambush,

soldiers at the ready in a literary Trojan Horse

or if they were silently huddled with party hats

and those annoying noise-makers, and presents,

full of self-congratulations at luring me to their surprise party

 

But whatever it was I know this:

those words were waiting for me.

 

Every conversation breaks for me, now

whatever that means.

 

My interchanges with everyone eventually snap with the finality of uncooked spaghetti.

Did they always? Do everyone’s?

Did the broken halves of all our conversations fill up the world like the packaging of preprocessed foods?

 

Maybe it’s only me.

Maybe I break those conversations by expecting them to be broken,

and so, along with those conversations,

I’m broken, too.

 

 

Tags: effected by poem, every conversation breaks somewhere, metapoem, poetry magazine