A Poem by April Salzano

Cliché

You, my words, my thoughts, my language. This

is the hell I visit on my way to catharsis. Here

is my reach for understanding,

the deeper meaning you think I am seeking

among your thoughts, the ghosts of your lost

arguments and failed attempts at discourse. I will give

you the fight you think I am picking, the scabs

you think I am ripping open. There is a change,

that much is true. I want to reach

one other soul and learn what

each of us lacks.

I want complete connection, to fit

together inside

the way your nose fits perfectly

against my forehead.

We were meant to lie

side by side, face to face, a circle

closed against time and space. If I could, I would erase

the lurking shadow of my past. I would take

all the intimacies and their antitheses and feed them through

your paper shredder, six sheets at a time,

cross cut into something fit

to line a hamster cage.

Let’s watch my past turn to ash, burn too quickly to catch

me, a blank greeting card, good for any occasion. Fill me

in with any stock phrase, any simple

explanation or retractable statement that holds no duplicity,

no metaphor. For you

I would stop my mind from doing its silly little dance

that turns bad into worse before I can

begin to throw stones at my own

house, one pebble at a time

until I am hurling boulders, dodging broken

memories where bits and pieces knot

my mane and mirrors deceive

even the most skillful of navigators. I am

lost in my head, my dialogue, my justifications. I am

tangled in my own speech. Metaphorical

and literal become indistinguishable. Don’t bother

pretending to understand. Meaning is subjective.

This is the place I bring us like a vacation

home, where we overstay our own

welcome, but don’t pack our things to go. The intensity

here will make the return to normalcy

and all its boredom feel beautiful again. Escape

is called that for a reason. When I am locked

in this house, trying each window and door

with precision before I fail, is that you I see

as still as a decoy dangling the key

from your mouth, but pretending to search

for a means to my release?

Your arms are outstretched but empty.

You want out. I’ll set you free.

You need pain. Let me play sadist.

You want to hide. Here, crawl inside.

I will give you a haven from which you will never come

home. I am your metaphor. I am your poem. Recite me.

I am your scar, your recurrent dream.

What I will take with me when I go is nothing

less than your soul, ripped wide open and ready

to embrace the void that will become

the nothing you have spent your life building.

April Salzano teaches writing at Westminster College. She has published poetry in several online and print journals and is currently working on her first collection of poems and an autobiographical novel on raising a son with Autism, if the beauty and pain allow articulation.