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Everything that had to be said

has been said.

We’ve sounded out the words endlessly, in dimly lit scenes,

dredging through the dark corners of our minds,

reaching inside our chests to pull out the offending organ,

soft, swollen, red,

and tossed it around casually,

with the raised inflections of our dead words.

It gathers lint, and dust, and the poison

of an emotion once expressed, which cannot be taken back,

a shadow of doubt,

and a thick black tar film of bitterness.

Mercilessly, we extend the pincers,

to encircle the tender shape of our entwinement—

delirious with danger, heavy with irony,

I cut you deeply,

only to watch myself bleed.

And then, the next morning,

we restart the discussion:

the negotiations, the justifications, the delineations

cloud the air and move, smothering, down the windpipe;

we thrash violently against the oncoming stalemate

as it creeps and scrapes through the lungs

at the empty wound of space where, once, something else

used to be.