Tongues

Thinking about leaving, focused on feeling left behind,
a girl with a chain at her throat and arrows for brains
falls out of my novice pencil tip:
eyes clenched shut, lips pressing tight,
she reminds me I don't need a gun anymore
to force myself into the night --
a hand is more than enough
when behaviors flood the brain
with an overdose of feelgood.

Each finger tip is a different bullet:
one for each half of this awful dissonance --
I could feel my whole body relax,
let my mind go like a dissatisfied balloon
but if I do that, my peace becomes a ticking clock,
each chemical tick taking me closer to sober.
How much I want the pipe anyway
is the first bullet, rampaging through.

The second is the shape of my husband --
sitting out in the garage, passing the minibong
to my best friend, only an hour after passing my words up
as I tried to fill him in on my day, my changes, my
intermittent struggle with whether I should smoke or not.
When he comes in, a cloud attached to feet,
I try to hide the girl with chains but he asks to see anyway
and I've never been good at denying him things.

He leans, he sees, he senses a problem and I watch
his eyes, red rimmed, start to water
as he tries to pinpoint the problem --
I send him away. Not out of anger or resentment,
but desire to keep drawing, keep listening to
the same lyrics I did when I was a child
and felt suffocated between a rock and the hard center
of my loneliness.  

Water slops onto my sketchbook
and I can't stop laughing about how cyclical life is
until he wanders back in, silent, and starts folding clothes.
Feeling his presence, I stop, turn the music off, stare at the socks
in his hand, an eyebrow full of questions.
"...I just wanted to be near my best friend."

Funny, how we both want the same thing,
have for half a decade now,
but still have moments when we're sure
we're each speaking half a dozen different languages.
The truth is, his heart can speak in any tongue--
but the words will be useless if I refuse to open my ears.