Backstage at the Whisky Harlot, my hands wrung my notebook like a dishtowel. It was Poetry Night and I was up next. My ex-boyfriend stood at the microphone in the spotlight’s smoky shaft, his voice quivering over broken trust, remorse, and imperfect love. The audience floated like pale ghosts in the darkness, enthralled by the thing they haunted. They ate him up but the sound of his voice made me sick to my stomach.
I had found that snake tangled up in his bed with a random whore. In the dim glow of his bedside lamp, she had made urgent, hungry sounds as her head bobbed above his crotch and he whispered her name, as he had once whispered mine and I escaped into the hallway like a thief.
At home, I had hurled into the toilet and sat cross-legged and inconsolable on the floor amid my hundred thousand pieces scattered to the walls. I wrote by reflex words that cut and jabbed like polished swords flashing in the sun.
It will take time to heal, my therapist had said. I laughed. The weak seek out healing. The righteous seek out vengeance.
The host called my name. My ex had left the stage and it was my turn now.
Under the spotlight’s cyclops eye, my lips trembled over the microphone’s ear like a timid lover afraid to spoil the moment while the pale ghosts waited below in expectant silence. They had paid for beauty, but what had I brought? Maggots on a carcass. An abscess festering foul under the skin. How could I draw my thirsty sword without drawing my own blood? I had shed so, so much already.
I wrote a new poem that night, for them, for him, but mostly for me.
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Text: © 2023 Kevin M. Coleman
Photo: Yoel J Gonzalez on Unsplash