The Vase

"it has always been my desire to write poetry but i find it incredibly f*****g difficult." -david shrigley

the vase

the tuesday i drove up to see you, i was prepared

to have a bad day. i knew i wouldn’t be able to stay long. you had to go

back to work in a bit, but we sat at a coffee shop because i insisted

i would write that day. i had a million sentences in my notebook

but none of them sounded right when i put them next to each other.

i was a mess of metaphors, mostly about sunflowers and water and glass.

inside of me, a vase had cracked and the flowers were still swimming

in the puddle of water that once nourished them. the petals were ridden

with blades of glass and tiny specks of dirt. everything was irreparably wet

and still like a crime scene. the kind of tragedy no one wanted to clean up.

i ripped the back of my pen off and laid all the pieces

of it on the table. you gathered the remnants

and started putting it back together. when i asked what you were doing,

you said you were fixing my pen. it made so much sense for you to repair, you could not rest

until it was clean and working again, the same way you wiped the table

with your wetted napkin when we finished eating at restaurants. you wanted everything

to be orderly. i wished my words would fit in my poems. we had a lot in common

in ways i still don’t think make sense. you had to take it apart even more

before you started putting it together again. it was in seven pieces on the table. we are experts

at destruction. the difference between us is that i unlike you, never learned

how to put my messes back together. you handed the pen back to me. i clicked it against my thumb, pressed it to my paper, and tried, again, to fix what i had broken.

AJ