Added: Jan 30, 2012

From: thomaskerrymichael

Duration: 4:47

FULL TEXT BELOW Janet (This poem was inspired by a scene in the film Another Year directed by Mike Leigh, 2010). There are so many broken people I might still become. My futures have always been shifting storylines drawn by fractured hands. My voice box spins the only suture thread that stitches my true history to myself. I'm afraid of that wound tearing open. Janet, a woman in her mid-fifties, sits facing her doctor in the small office. She wears a clean, simple, black and white print dress and small, tasteful gold hoop earrings. She will not be taken for trash. Today there are no purple splotches on her ribs or back, no broken cartilage in her nose, no cracks in her eye sockets. She offers the doctor nothing to examine, says only that she cannot sleep at night. She wants medicine. The doctor holds a ball point pen poised above a clip board, inquires with professional concern: Is there trouble in her marriage? With her children? With money? These questions fall on Janet's bowed head like radioactive confetti in a parade of the damned. A marching band of lost little girls in faded uniforms plays in a degraded time signature that only she can hear. Cheering mannequins leaning out of windows wave from above; each one wears Janet's wedding dress. She cannot tell the doctor where it hurts. My futures have always been shifting storylines drawn by fractured hands. I can only become what I can imagine telling myself, the whispers of a lonely healing. I am so afraid of that wound tearing open, rendering me unable to be what I cannot imagine to say. The doctor persists: How much caffeine does she drink? How much alcohol? Janet's rage rises like the spiked hair on the back of a cornered dog. Then her lips tighten into a leash, deny her fury its bite. She has learned to calculate when provoked. She knows the scent of human power. So she tosses syllables at the doctor like spare change, just enough coins to keep moving without reproach or eye contact: No, she does not drink; her husband drinks. Two grown children: the son is at home and just like his father; the daughter is gone and only returns for more burglary. The bile of the unsaid rises in her throat; she gags on the untold. Having never mastered the idiom of becoming unbroken, she now knows only how to swallow. I became the only thing I could think of to tell myself. Before the whispers of a lonely healing, the ruptures of the world were my mirrors; every horror wore my face. Rendered unable to be what I could not imagine to say, I was, for a time, the object of my own muted loathing. The doctor now, too, falls silent; does not know how to ask: How old was she when shards of shattered afternoons etched out the story of why she would never be chosen? Was it needing to know where storms come from that made her believe she causes the rain? Whose face does she see when she remembers she is to blame for everything that hurts? Where did she learn that it's her fault when curfew falls and nothing tender comes home? Who are the hoodlums running in the streets of her story keeping her deadlocked and chained? When the teeth of her children bite her fingers, does she hate her hands? Does she scrub her skin with pumice and wonder why it never feels clean? When she sees handsome young men fawning over pretty young women, whose voice does she hear mocking her? Does her life feel like a living room with no furniture, a kitchen with nothing for her to eat? Does she wonder how long she can go on like this? The ruptures of the world were once my mirrors; every horror once wore my face. My voice box now spins the suture thread that stitches my true history to myself. But I was, for a time, the object of my own muted loathing, So I know, there are so many broken people I might still become. © 2012 by Tom Slavin

Channel: People

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