Spill

It's not a taste, because it's here in my chest? Or my spine? But it's like a taste - water tainted with traces of metal. The taste of metal. In my throat. It's in my throat. Or my blood? It's in my brain. Copper-tasting sobs, ringing at a frequency I'm unfamiliar with. Twisting something desperate from some uncharted region between the sacrum and the sternum. A nervous child's tears. Hollow zinc. Distilled water leaching out the body's minerals.

A raw place. A sulphurous cave. A junkyard after a week of rain.

A spring night that found me walking and walking
just to stand for 15 seconds
watching you
oblivious.

But that was then.

Sometimes I feel I'm watching my mind lose itself, it splinters off, broken and confused fractals, and I cast the nets out again and again in a recovery effort, but the cells keep shedding, and the touchpoints are blurry.
Another pot of black coffee
the scattered pieces of an erector set
a bowl of ripe fruit.
A cat.
A shoe.
A bottle of beer.
I don't mean to back away.
But my needs
exceed
my abilities.