My Heart is Houdini, and for the Next Trick, I'll Stop Breathing…

Disappointment is all she expects of him and me these days,

Un satisfaction is the new normal for us both baby,

It's l'heure verte and I'm just the lourche,

Morphine peach is the color of empathy,

Empathy,

She held the blanket,

In paper thin fingers,

Left to right left to right, left to right, left to right,

I watched the hands on the clock face drop like flies,

When they were both too naive to think about time,

And the casual cruelty of drowning seconds,

How little any of us can afford to stay under water for this long,

With our lungs filling with salt like that,

And he kept asking himself,

If when he died people would say,

With the same soft tone of regret,

"God that boy could hold his breath",

She kept picking at pieces,

Of imaginary glass on the bed,

While the room just got smaller,

She asked if she'd put the cigarette out properly,

She hadn't been able to smoke in days,

Or to eat in weeks,

Her body impossibly thin,

Stretched in pain,

Stretched in pain,

My heart is Houdini and for my next trick I'll stop breathing,

While trying to string a sentence together and whistle the right tune...

In my bones I know it's time to go home,

Released from the talons of electric birds,

I returned to a graveyard,

Blackbirds build their nests inside,

The broken windows of the mausoleum,

Now no one knows I'm here,

The words we uttered at the burial

Were barely of this world: ashes, dust,

Thy kingdom come. It must be magic:

A man inside a box. Just a damn box.

For a while everyone wandered...

"How long can he hold his breath in there?"

...But then they watched the shovel growl at the dirt,

While my pine overcoat became less visible,

Knowing now that I was never there from the start,

Across the field, a woman tapes,

A sheet of paper to a tombstone,

With a stick of charcoal, she begins,

To rub the contours of the rock,

The name becomes clear,

In the absence of color,

It's becoming increasingly clear,

Just as fast as I had heard,

That rock bottom is a collage education,

That when all the color is swept away,

The truth about my life was etched in gray,

"He died trying to try..."

I wish it wasn't so,

Let me suffer in silence.