No Help for That | Jackie Clark

it was friday and the typical losses were upon her.
from the porch, she watched as the kittens squinted

their eyes toward the sun, and thought about the way
the word “I” sounded in her voice. she realized then

that it was quite pointless to express anything in first person.
“I” to her, meant the person who was responsible,

the person that with such conviction, charged blindly,
bucking and kicking at things in a manner that would later

prove to have been purposeless. the “I” is what was meant
to feel and because of that the willing couldn’t comprehend it,

or maybe not so much comprehend it but actually solicit it from herself.
no, the “I” was something she quietly picked at and never asked

to come along to parities. the triumph of the “I” had lost all meaning
to the willing and had caused her to take extra long glances

as others when they walked by, not to see them better, but to see
if she was real to them, being that she was perfectly convinced otherwise.

it is in this way that she tells a story now.

she tells it to the spiders on her ceiling at night
&
to the junk mail she devotingly opens in order to discard.

she sings it to herself while facing the computer screen at work,
all the while hoping that this time it will have been worth it

because someone else would hear. but what has begun to frighten
the willing is that maybe she has stopped telling her story altogether,

all the while thinking that she was.