BB Grey–musings

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A fraud, they said.

But to be a fraud one must first know the real thing.
I never got the blueprint, only the ghost of a house.
This rope, not hemp but memory, knots me to myself.
I dream of Houdini-ing out, each kiss from my wife a lockpick made of breath.

I was married once. I think it still counts.
God knows, I do. She didn’t.
But that is another story, a cake with too few candles to hold the dark.

What is a word but a small silence talking over a larger one?
The imposter is the mask we invent to keep the wound from speaking.
I was never that, no matter how hard I tried.
And the trying, of course, is the crime. The opposite of being.

In the end, there is only the space between yes and no.
I think I said no, but my zipper broke,
a metal tooth refusing to part. The words stayed in, a swallowed key.
They say silence means yes, even when your screams are violent enough
to pull a shoulder from its socket, a door off its hinge.

This is as real as I get: on the page,
where I might be quoted back to myself
before a jury of liars—or was it a twelve-pack of beers?
I get the two confused.

The shoulder never healed.
The cotton batting was just white. Fluffy. Soft.
Until it wasn’t. There were letters. There was approval.
It wasn’t an opium war. But man makes everything a fight,
just to win, just to call the wise man a loser.

I know less now than when I was naked and crying,
my first word: hello. That is the better story,
the one I wish I could write without being told it’s wrong.

But it lives where letters jam against those that will not budge,
a 405 freeway pileup, the fast track a toll road
only for those who can afford the self.

The magician’s top hat: empty.
The rabbit: late.
And the wizard, when I arrived,
was just a scarecrow in a field of hate,
stitching his own skin with yesterday’s straw.

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