Kairosclerosis ✔ [poetry]

discharge

16

DISCHARGE

⸻

i. they shot him in his eyes,

his mouth.

shot him in his brain,

his heart.

the bullet holes left no ugly puckered scars or badly-healed gashes.

but there are still bullets lodged inside him.

swollen and infected and bubbled over,

aching in places that could not be

touched or spoken to.

the boy i once loved,

for all his uninteresting life and boorish talks,

the boy who was once

a study of simmering yellow and orange,

the boy before the war,

the boy i once knew through and through—

that boy

is gone.

only the war remains

in the boy i once knew.

ii. he sits across from me,

eyes hooded.

in my arms, he's stiff,

Still.

no longer strong.

no longer kind.

when he finally reaches out and kisses my chest,

open-mouthed,

the pad of his palms press against

the ridges of my rib cages,

the shapes of his half-healed exit wounds match

the back of my hands,

he smells like booze and cigarettes,

feels like summer dust and winter sun,

looks like bloody sadness and miserable glory.

and i realise how a corpse

can still breathe,

live.

iii. one day, he lays still enough for me

to tilt his head up and touch the place

between his brows, where the first bullet

has pierced through.

i cut his skin open.

in his body, his veins are hollow,

dry.

i crack his skull and unspool his brain, pausing

at the crackled and creased moments

because they were the only ones visible

amongst numerous redacted sequences.

I see him:

living out a beat-up honda;

being brought home in an empty coffin;

drifting in the opposite direction to the hurry crowd;

staring at calloused, shaking hands with wide pupils.

smiles and eyes a tad razor-sharp,

name formed shadow in hidden crevices and nooks

of abandoned structures

footsteps across desolated roads

pockmarked with bombs and tire tracks.

laughter drowned out

by a constant, phantom viciousness of war

—the one inside his own head,

waged by those who have never been shot at before;

the war within my embrace,

the one he trawls, over and over, in his sleep.

the boy i once love is alive,

but he can't be revived.