exquisite cupboards

Bali / Oct. 2020

Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY / sometime between 2014 and 2018

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What have you done with your negligent lovers?
Filed them away, have you?
Such exquisite cupboards
Will you show me
the Dewey Decimal system you use
and where you put your
text message breakups
and your ghosts?
Compartmentalization
is the skill of the emotional apocalypse
and I want to be ready
to survive
like you do
or not
like you do
but like I do
with say, 10% less wrenching heartbreak.

You do know the Dewey Decimal system, right?
Oh no, you're too young.
Card catalogs of libraries past 
— ancient, inefficient, singular —
One card, one book
One number, one tome
Typewritten — click, click, clack, chhhhka!
and filed obediently with a shhh!
There they are
Humble armies of past lives
unlived untaken
roads
an index card per each
a drawer per card
an abbreviation of the time you spent 
under each other's 
fingernails
rubber
ink pads and penmanship
comprehensively analog
because

Old lovers can only ever be pinpointed by hand.
They're made of journal pages steeped in garages
filaments of flesh memories
incepted
bits of plastic attributed with great meaning
tributary cemeteries of memory
build over silt
built on sand
tectonic plates puzzled 
shuffled
and dealt out rearranged
topography
cresting 
and waving
every time one loves
and loses

And the amount of times I have lost!
I singlehandedly resurrect bygone poets
with the veracity and the tick
of my ventricular heart!
ba-boom, tick!
(Doctor always said I had an arrhythmia. Don't worry, he said.
Irregular heartbeats, he said, are not dangerous.)
(tick!)

Is it possible
your drawers
sufficiently categorize and confine
all ice queens
every unfaithful
and each time she passed you over
for the better-looking guy...
Is it possible you're so good at cupboards
fitting things inside of other things so perfectly
that they hardly open again
pry them though you might
because once
when you were very young
it was some heartbreak
and you vowed
with the ferocity of a double-digit birthday
a tenacious
10
whole years lived on this planet
with an imprint
the import
of a television flashback repeated at least
three times per season
that you'd Never
Be Hurt 
That Way
Again
Oh no.
No nono.
Instead you'd leave
carcass after carcass of feminine hope
in your wake
ah, you've a new girlfriend
i see the carrions circling

You know, on third thought
perhaps your drawers and cupboards,
cabinets and closets
memory palace minefields of loaded boxes
aren't such a feat, after all
I don't want to rob you of your stoicism cred
but for it to count when you lay your liaisons to rest...
You've got to care.
And if you didn't. If you don't.
If you can't
because you've wedged the lids so very tightly
then I'm not sure your Dewey Decimals have much to offer me.

In fact, here
a gift

This is my filing cabinet
None of the drawers close.