breakthrough

lord knows what it was
that got me so angry on saturday
enough to say "fuck you"
enough to say "let me out"
my hand clawing at the door handle
my insides clawing at my insides
the terrible itch to leave
disappear, start over, erase
what was and what had been in favor
of getting the hell out of this car
this day, this love, i couldn't
take it, this one saturday, didn't want
what i'd spent so much time gathering in, building up,
furious at myself, suddenly, for doing all that work,
because where was it leaving me anyway
if it could be fucked up so easily
and i wondered, would it always be this way,
the closeness, the tying together, the deep
mysterious magnetism that kept two people
orbiting, the warmth, the fine romance, the gooey sex,
the relief and gratitude and simplicity of falling asleep
each night under the same blanket, all of that cut,
unintelligibly, in two, my heart cleaving just like that,
the language i thought i'd been translating so well
suddenly untranslatable, my own words and signals,
which had been received so smoothly, now catching
bad airwaves, faulty wiring, interference of every kind
and why that would make me so angry
who knows, but there i was, furious, fuck-you furious,
clawing at the car door furious, my whole body mutinous,
feeling punished, macerated, torn down from the
pretty picture i'd been carrying, feeling betrayed,
broken into shards,

how is that possible, just a moment, really,
a tiny fragment of time, and yet
so whole, so complete, so monumentally proportionate
i couldn't help but fall under the spell of my own fury.

so how can i explain what brought me back,
how impossible it was, that fleeting patch of light
which somehow held on and pulled me in again
toward home.