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Just accept the compliment about the goddamn cheesecake

But no, you are an end, not a beginning:
You cannot say “thank you”
You can only mutter
“The crust is burned.”

You will live the rest of your fragile shallow years alone with the shades drawn
In your broken grey slippers
That you will neither stitch nor replace until you fall down the stairs from the open seam
And not even then.
When he offers you his hand
You will fake a smile and turn on the microwave
And tear through another frozen diet chemical meal tray in under a minute, tasting nothing
Feeling less
And then you will tell him
“I’m fat.”

Dead woman walking
Hunchback and mangled foot and
Shuttered eyes, shuffling distraction, registering nothing on your long joyless face
Everything pointing down everything the opposite of change
Life is a conversation and you are a wall
You refuse humans and bruises
So brittle whittled bone awaits your next massive fracture.
Catastrophe and nothing
The solution is still on your desk
Under the handicapped placard and the blindfolds in orange bottles
Why do you not heed your many messengers?

This is the place where things break
And remain broken.