Death Sentence

Departure Abandonment was always your specialty,

something you perfected through the decades.

The middling middle amputated in every aftermath,

lies sparkling, refracting the light you snuffed out

in me, like you slipped my joy into a hip pocket,

keeping it sequestered away from reality,

leaving a lake of miserable loneliness in my bed

to drown me in my sleep.

I hurl my palpitating pain in your general direction,

like lumps of coal

too far out to sight through a scope,

my swallowed rage hardening into diamonds

to be slipped onto resentful fingers that meditate ways

to pry my life apart, biopsy me, remove my malignancy

from life as I knew it.

This gulf of grief is no swimming hole,

sharks and rip currents circling, rending flesh from bone,

ex-wives and new girlfriends hold their tribunal in my absence,

holding their severed treasures, my limbs, my life, aloft:

evidence to be used against me,

your gavel galvanizing what’s left of me

when it smacks my sentence down.

I’m guilty of being incomplete.