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Graham High

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Breakdowns

I

There is poison in the house

You can hear it. The hideous whispers
after the children are in bed.

Is it a negotiated peace
or another death threat?

Everyone here is a terrorist.
Everyone here has been blessed.

There’s a flood of poison in the house
and every orifice throws up,

retches, regardless, its abundance
of grief, its soured affections,

emetic humiliations, flushing out
all circumspection of self respect.

II

In this house there’s a bomb.

Inside each unbalanced room
there’s a wired-up mercury switch

rigged to trigger am explosion
of shouts, of volatile rights and wrongs.

At any tilt the household breaks up,
though everyone here is the same person,

self-righteous in the sense of injury,
preparing in secret the incendiary.

A matching family of arms and legs
goes flying through the window.

Is it the ruined shards of a chair?
With the shreds of someone sitting there?

 

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