Cheating the Polygraph

Like you know, I did not
talk back.
Not because I'd lost my voice (close enough, though)
but because from that
moment on,
yours became a cloudy
polyphone
of weak air signals.
Always too hushed (to be homed)
always too many
(to be yours)
It took me a couple of
doubled-over nights
and a book of terrible straitjacket
poems to get here,
but what the hell, I'm
here now. Good bad ugly? Na, I swore nobody's
any. But I see a little
beyond that, now.
It's you against your
sickness and
everybody else, a slow-motion
accident.
Collateral damage,
is that the word?
Perhaps.
And every one knows /anything /goes -
Only it doesn't. Scary as it is, people
are real. Real enough.
Some still have the gall to
feel, falter.
Fall? Bleed their guts out before
driving the fuck on, may be.
Sans swerve-aways, sans
shame.
And the brain can only smoke
so much auto-defenses
to haze their
faces into flakes
of impersonal moments. It's
you against your sickness, and
I see how I got in the way.



But hey, I'm not the one cheating the polygraph.

(Not anymore.)