Muse

The poet wants her to die, wants a bullet to find her temple. He writes in the margin with unnecessary pressure, her temple is like a thumbprint. The poet doesn’t want her to suffer. He wants pain and shutdown to be exact: a storm’s flash and roar stacking its violence overhead. But the poet can’t get the bullet out of the gun. He’s not stupid. That bullet’s got to be going pretty fast to shatter the car window and her skull. Maybe a killer waits at her exit; she slows down to read his cardboard sign, thinks, this man looks shattered, wonders, how does a puppy lose a leg. Oh, how the poet wants her to die and he doesn’t have to have a reason. Not enough people actually die in poems, not enough to account for all the dying found there. The poet, like her, just wants it to happen. He is bored with his own meager protestations that it’s not better to have loved. He is tired of the buff and shine. Most of all he is tired of words in the way all the time. The long white hallway of the page taunts him with more precision, more contact, and he just scrawls his graffiti: she sleeps the sleep of a petty thief, he scratches it out, she sleeps the sleep of a newborn. She is someone he could love. He aims the gun and fires.