Splintered Ties

A poem about fragments

**Trigger warning: references to mental health and war**

Shame runs hot. Splintered family, shards I’d love to pull out but can’t.

How many of you have stopped speaking to your family? How many of you have come to an impasse?

What is it like to no longer feel, to grow the thick second skin of an emotional leper?

Ambivalence sets in. Blue green grey vagueness. I’m nearly invisible now. Some call it depression.

I turn to those optimistic liars, whose white-toothed listicles shine a little too brightly — promises that might make Rhonda Byrne blush.

There is a snake in some smiles. They glide so smoothly — smile of a salesman, smile of an actor, an assassin’s smile.

I detect a little defensiveness in their insistence on always seeing the bright shiny sides of things. They dress like psychologists, but talk like auctioneers. Like alchemy, they turn sadness into shame, anger into blame.

And I bait. I bite. For I am Don Quixote. I see things that are not there. I want to believe. I want to be distracted.

Missiles in Mariupol, killing in Kiev. Bombs dropped by fathers with mouths to feed. Dinner is eaten in silence.

What does their food taste like?

The absence of questioning. The absence of irony. The absence. The awesome vacancy, hungry, unwhole and heavenly.

Have the gods seen enough? Have they turned their backs on their own experiment?

Do you know what it’s like to come to an impasse?

These damn shards. Broken familial ties like splinters. Dumb tears, wasted years.

In the night sky the gods laugh and play like infants, shaking the dipper like it’s a baby rattler.

© Carlo Zeno 2022

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Thank you for reading. For more of my poems, please read two below.