Puzzle Pieces

[rowens]

as if I were a puzzle

to be solved, to be broken and made whole

again and again, until pieces begin to disappear

behind the furniture, and frustration appears in the spaces

left by those small fractions of me that meant nothing much

until they were gone.

You weren’t just one of those pieces.

You were the straight edge, the corners,

the definition and the safety

that finished this puzzle and kept those wayward parts

from escaping into the dust and dirt.

You were the last piece, the satisfaction,

the beginning and the end, the metaphor

for sanity that made all too much sense to me

as this description of my body fades into the darkness

of my mind and those puzzle pieces are lost to me in the cracks

while you are lost to me in the real world

and I am coming apart, piece by piece,

swallowed by the furniture and the grass


I like all of that bit. The only part I wondered about was the "again and again", that's really the only part where I thought there could be less words, it could just say

I describe my body as if from outside,

as if from above, as if I were a puzzle

to be solved, to be broken and made whole

again, until pieces begin to disappear

But what do you think?