The Secret to Happpiness

 When the News reporter’s voice invaded our home

We ran to the kitchen

Trying to escape the bubbling monotones

Dripping like caustic magma from his mouth to our minds

In the kitchen we clanked silverware

To drown out the words

Corroding our minds like caustic magma

Our foreheads leaning together for comfort

We couldn’t drown out that image with noise

You exhaled the terror softly against my face

Our foreheads pressed together

“Meat hooks and electrical wires”

Your terrorized exhalation was fetid with fear

Begging me to tell you it wasn’t true

Meat hooks and electrical wires snaked into skin and sinew

In that cold cell underground

I couldn’t tell you it wasn’t true

You could see his tendons hanging against the wall

Of that cold cell underground

His scapula scraped against the meat hooks that crucified him

You could see tendons

The spasming of his ganglion bared to the abrasive air

Crucified sacrilegiously on meat hooks by his own scapula

Electrical wires spiked into the soft curve of his feet

The twitching of his ganglion are the shadowiest signs of life

His blood spattered against his ribcage and the walls

The electrical wires wedged into the carbuncle veins of his forearms

Perhaps his heart burst from the impulse snaking up his spine

His blood spattered against his ribcage and my skull

While I stood on the blank white tiles of my kitchen

Afraid that the toaster would send an electrical impulse snaking up my spine

Feeling too young to know this

I stood on our stark white tiles

 And exhaled the fetid secret

We were too young to know

 “just don’t think about it”

I whispered it to you

Without the slightest shame

“Just don’t think about it”

The Secret to Happiness