Laboratory Model
They didn’t understand: I never wanted
to kill myself, just to hang in the air
a little while, my body uncommitted
to any particular surface, loose
as a starfish someone’s scooped from the sea
floor and let drift back to the bottom. Only
then my head—as if the flushed and lovely
assistant in a magic trick—disappeared,
and with it my plan for getting down. But
the story had a happy ending none-
theless: they cleaned me up and screwed a silver
eye into my skull. Now I am free
to spend my hours gently swinging in and out
of the slatted light. Look at me: I can’t stop smiling.
2 responses
This gave me a funny feeling inside. Like something ethereal was biting down on my soul and I could feel it in my chest. My body. And as I kept reading it felt like my teeth were biting something invisible.
I really dig this.
Not bad. Line breaks could use a little tweaking: a stronger line break in the first line would have been to end it “I never wanted to kill” and breaking “nonetheless” in the middle of the word, hyphenating it, is an unfortunate choice, as this is a gimmick unjustified in any poem (since there is no limit to the length of a line, there is no need to end a line in the middle of a word), let alone one in which only one word is so hyphenated. Also, one could tighten up the second line by saying simply “just hang in the air” (and for that matter, breaking that line after “hang” would possibly have been more interesting, although it’s not a bad line break as is). Also, the end could be tighter, to give it a stronger impact:
to spend my hours swinging
in and out of the slatted light; look at me—
I can’t stop smiling.
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