The chandelier tinkles inside my chest
as my body sways to and fro
on the rolling deck
as the music swells
I remember kissing her in this room
With a mouthful of glue
Not realizing she had a glass eye
hidden beneath her tongue
She kept boxes of scraps and patches
bits and bobs and odds and ends
Snippets and clippings, chunks and crumbs
Parts of broken objects and devices
To reassemble into endless self-portraits.
She would smash mirrors just
to make mosaics of the shards
Broken plates and bottle caps and teeth
and hedgehog quills and feathers
and curved needles of glass
like scorpion stingers
The flash of a diamond necklace
plunging into the icy waters
A tiny reflection of her face
in every facet
After she shattered, I kept those cobwebbed fragments
in a cardboard suitcase deep within the closet.
Stored that fistful of pale sand, and the darker one,
mixed them like salt and pepper in a jar.
Kept the porcelain doorknobs and rusty nails
The naked wooden spools, the locks I'd forgotten
the combination to
I knocked and banged them together
but never made anything from them
like she would have
Why have I held onto them so long
Why do I keep breaking into that echoing chamber
to stand beneath the chandelier
with open arms
as it stretches out its legs
and prepares to descend
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