... (XXII)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0f96DBBRGs&ab_channel=GlassAnimals-Topic

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It's just pain, darling.

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What you call cold, distant,

Disinterestedly separate,

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Is just my reaction -

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My turning inward and

My biting on the bit -

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Against a condition of pain, 

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Against those moments

When the pain extends beyond

My ability to effectively hide it.

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And I know,

I know that what you see

Is a man

Leaning on the bannister, over the balcony,

With a lit cigarette, encroaching on the barrier

Of the knuckles, that separate his fingers.

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I know that you see the shadow of some junkie,

The drunk, so far sedated 

That his eyes turn to resembling glass,

Locked in the caged sockets

Of what can only be assumed

To be an empty skull.

.

I know,

That such a person might seem incapable, of loving,

Of listening, of owing attention to what you might share;

Incapable of responding to your touch, the tentative reaching

Towards a person who appears, if not to be there,

Than instead, to be transpositionally elsewhere.

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I know this.

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And yet I can't deny, that though different,

My experience still corresponds to that appearance.

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Because I'm not there,

Leaning against the railing, 

Insensitively indifferent to you; 

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I'm somewhere else

Desperately trying to shake hands

With a fist that isn't there either -

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One, that grips, and tightens in its entanglement,

That defies the shape of a hand, to begin with, 

That curls its thumb, into an indivisible palm

That, again, both isn't there

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And that twists into the sensation of all of the other fingers -

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That at times, does this so tightly,

That the muscles in the limb that remains - the residual, misshapen one -

Set to spasms, in an almost desperate attempt 

To find the hand that doesn't.

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And though I know,

I know,

That you'd know,

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That there isn't anything that I can do about it,

That you can do to help, or that doctors can do to treat it.

,

Though I know this,

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I think you should, too, know,

That I'm not asking you to stay -

I don't expect you to have to watch me

As I suffer my way through it, 

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However temporary it sometimes might be

And still how permanently it'd seem to affect.

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And yet, 

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If you do, decide to,

Know that I'd be asking you to excuse

My inability to pretend, that it isn't any other way,

And that its sensation, elsewise 

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Doesn't demand my attention

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To an extent that I both can't refuse

And that I cannot, for the life of me, escape.

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Author's Note

(I'm just passing time).