I watch you as you persist “Just know it isn’t you.
You are not the reason I’m acting this way.”
As if those strings of loosely bound words could ever
make the sound of the silence feel any less sharp, as if
they could scrub the blood from the walls of the family room.

And my stomach hurts. It’s every time
you lift the stern curve of your chin
in a direction that isn’t towards me.
I’ve been spending almost seventeen years
desperately trying to memorize every word from the
Miriam-Webster of your body language. But I guess that now your
body language is a dead language
now to me completely.

I think that I worry about you more than anyone
else who falls within the parameters of my demographic grouping
and I’m wondering if it’s something about your posture or
your arms folded across your chest at precise angles
that cause me to slip into the pit and for my heart to beat
harder, not in the nice kind of way, but in the way
that’s similar to nightmares when you’re being chased
and you can never, ever get away no matter how fast you run.

I wonder if you realize it. If that you are aware
that your own suppressed perceptions and judgments
are what is being to cause your daughter to wish
that she could scrape her insides out so that at least that way
she would have an excuse for always feeling so empty.

I’ve become a master of my knife skills,
from learning how to cut tension but now
I feel as though I require something more
along the lines of a battle ax to cleave at
all the empty spaces in our conversations
where all I want to is scream like a battle cry.

But I can’t even blink too fast
or fold my hands or swallow
or look down. Because I know
even something as simple as that
could be enough to ignite everything
in this home.

It’s invisible suburban dollhouse warfare.
We’re being fed dialogue from things which
we cannot see and it is breaking my heart.
And I’m pretty sure yours hasn’t held up so well either
not since it’s been holding together only by fragments of
fake laughter and your witty one-liners
for the longest time, your tongue was the only thing
that kept you sane.

So I ask
Even after you calmly “It isn’t you,
don’t worry.” (with those latter two words
in consistent reverberation at a pitch that
my ears can’t and won’t comprehend)
How can it not be my fault
when every action I execute
seems to be measured
when every breath I inhale is judged
and noted on your
projected introspective clipboard.

If I am not
what measures up
we’re purging back to familiar battle lines
with body language militias that I am not sure
exist or not.

If the universe is everything
and everything is everything
the last thing I want to be
is empty I want to be
filled with everything from flowers
to the froth of the water of the not so blue ocean
I want to be bitten by a shark so I’ll have a story to tell
I want to bite the wind and be assaulted by the hands of the elements
where nothing else matters
and nothing else is real.

I don’t just want to be filled
I want to overflow
so I bleed from the walls of the family room
into the universe
and everything else
in symmetry.