The Signs of Choking

The Victim Can’t Speak or Breathe
and the world is silent, a slow blur, each red car
in front of you: specific, the strangers around you: pure
movement, everything enlarged, then microscopic, trying
to get back inside your body, and then you remember
your first pillow (smelled of Tide), your first pair of underoos
(Superman),
your first swim (afraid to go underwater), your first day
leaving home (the Disney-school-bus-lunch-pail in your hand)
and how your mother cried in the kitchen window,
remember the way everything always
never mattered
before this?

The Victim Collapses
again and again and differently
with each remembering, and just maybe it was meant to be this way
or already happened, always already
happening, just maybe the one last thing that matters
is how you die, or the one good suit
you wore everywhere to everything that made you feel important
and happy, or the way you let yourself be touched
and tasted and liked it, the way you didn’t know then
your father driving off in his red pickup
would be every man you’d ever love
returning love.

The Victim Turns Blue
and it’s not so bad really, is it? to be the robe of a virgin who made a
savior
who saved a world from wanting, not so bad
to be a bruise spit out
from the mouth of last night’s undressed
stranger, a magic marker uncapped on the living room floor
of a snooty next door neighbor,
a dead friend’s favorite cup filled up
and sipped from each morning, a broken-in
pair of jeans, a perfectly stained
T-shirt, to crave
what you were afraid to crave
and get it.