Note: The opening line comes from Derrick C. Brown’s “After the Bachelor’s Party” from his book Scandalabra.
Today I’m gonna call the bomb squad and ask them to dismantle
me. Today I want to string pieces of my skin together like
Christmas lights, plug them in and see if anything turns
on. Tonight I’ll sing the songs spinning on my record player, smell
the scent of fresh vinyl as I pull it from its sleeve, set
the disc to spin, drop the needle and sink
into its sonic space, become another harmony tucked deep
into the bass line. Do my downstairs neighbors care
about the kick drum beating endlessly into the
floor of my living room/their ceiling?
Tomorrow I swear I’m going to fix the explosion that never
happened. Wake up well-slept, hair an explosive mess and without those
little crumbs of sleep fixed to the crevices between my eyes and
nose. All you have to do is call, and I will stop pacing the floor, stop
kicking up carpet fibers, stop the record from spinning the white
noise, flip it over to side-B so we can all see how the album
ends. All you have to do is remind me we never had a chance
anyway, that I was just a fling and I’m certifiable for believing
any other truth. Instead I guess I’ll pick up the dirty clothes that missed
the hamper when I tossed them halfway across my bedroom, thinking
one good deed for today is plenty. Later I’ll sprawl across my
brown, sunken in couch: left hand petting my dog’s head as she
tucks her head between my thigh and the back of the furniture, right
hand scrolling through tweets or posts or pins by everyone except
you. All the while, your favorite song streams in my head, Stop
for just a minute, I mumble to myself, and hit pause on the humming
melody. This is what emptiness feels like. It’s a waterfall rushing over me, knocking
breath out of me one puff of air at a time.
Tonight I’ll wake up sweating from a fever dream, sickness having
climbed into my gut like a mountaineer, leaving nothing but scraps of
ripped paper, formerly known as good ideas. I tried calling, I really
did, but hung up several times seconds before I was sure you would
pick up the phone. So I sleep away the plans I had for tomorrow, for
next summer, for fifteen years from now, convince myself I’ll write
the screenplay enacting all the mistakes I didn’t make; all the letting
down, cheating, screaming, the ogling the legs of
other women. Eventually the phone rang, but it wasn’t you: the bomb
squad called and said they’re running late.
“Bombs in the Dark” image by Flickr user Premasagar Rose
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Robert Morrison is a poet and singer/songwriter currently residing in Charlotte, NC. He teaches full time at South Piedmont Community College and recently earned his MFA from Ashland University. He spends his free time collecting things, especially books and vinyl records. He has previously been published in The Bastard Spiral, Burlesque Press, and Guide to Kulchur literary magazines.