Stalls Right in the Middle: A Prose Poem

Saturday Poetry Prompt: Dear Chaos…

Photo by Joshua Fuller on Unsplash

Stripping in your internal room with recipes for more photos to fuck up with fingerprints— in between wires and channels and screens that don’t load pages fast enough, you know sometimes stalls right in the middle — like when you hold a fork full of food an inch from your mouth for five minutes —

or more —

you don’t know these deaths like I do — what you know doesn’t make any sense but you entered Eris here and got a stone claw lodged at the high point of your cheek — laughing about it like mad — gone dark as a grey cloud above your eyebrows —

or you dipped a couple fingers into the bucket one more time for the shrimp swimming around, still cut in half —

and half sunk to the bottom — swirls round little plastic ridges like it’s being sucked in by a drain — the bucket doesn’t have one — and the saddest songs are happening — right alongside the brightest ones — preservation happens and no one actually hears any of it —

Dear, Chaos — I’m tired of your vampirism —

I don’t have any more blood than you do, and probably less sense — though I’m plenty sensitive — and that map, the one you keep leaving in tatters like a shredded tattoo, that one that directs the madness a…