When you are broken

I don’t know if you're
broken when you can still open

your eyes to your nails and find
skin beneath them, body
stretched like a
sailboat
each bone in place each rib
like a promise your chest still

serving as sailcloth. You’re
home, even if you're obese, even if tired.
you can cry on the floor
in a hotel room and you'll still be obese,
still like hamburgers, still need sleep

and know it. But you have a closet
full of holocaust
victims to return to, a road running into the tummies of
all of Africa, most of the Mediterranean, and losing
its trail in vacuity Mexico isn't an

escape, neither is your house.
Cries of horns, women and
sighs of old men, haggard eyes ricocheting
exhaustion-alarms off your attic, fill the glass
no reason to drink re-fill

the sky, stay up, watch it empty itself
into your lachrymal glands. You stick to music
because you started, because you are
a humming bird with no better

purpose. You know what the postcards
will say and wish you had settled for
blood in the arm they had spared him then

and now you have a
man with a bullet in his back buried
in your backyard as cattle, vegetables
growing on the mound with none but

the dead to feed. When you make up
conversations in your head and save them
up for afternoons to come, hoping
that the earth explodes

before they do. You can’t ask
about your mother or for
photographs of when it was
different, because maybe that equals

never. When you hold his hand
and you're cold when love feels as
stagnating as being convinced, or being

miles from it. The world sets out
to set you free from your peace
of mind, and when you give them
a piece of your mind,

the undoing begins. You let them molest you,
asking to yourself 'will this keep me safe will this

keep me..' and the know-it-betters won’t have
a benchmark answer. You're broken when
you swallow silence every night silence like
a nasty hangover you can’t

shake off. When you have stories
to be thrown up, but no
words are worth a damn, you know
what to do. Break them up,
and become

the puzzle pieces.