second to the right

cracked mirror, incessant
vibrations from his drums
holding breath to realize
what it might feel like
to really, truly break

but she'd never die.
"it's theoretically impossible,"
he'd say, hands crossed in thoughtful união,
like a spanish dancing of the honeybees;
"you'd pass out before you'd die,"
but all she's thinking is
one
two
three
count to ten, and it will be over
not suicide - not a pathetic attempt
at attention,
but a scientific experiment,
a surgery gone awry,
the attachment phase of
connecting sewing thread
to the dissolved bacteria in your skin

and maybe for a second he got serious, you'd dream in your head: maybe he'd say this -

"honey, i understand. if you want to sacrifice yourself for the betterment of society, i'll be standing there right alongside you, like helen keller's hand to helen keller's mind," (but there he goes again, slipping into the pretentiousness of hipster-headed, pbr-infested, ginsberg- and keruac-reading minds) "i'd play that song at your funeral, too."

but when you slip out of an ethereal state of mind
all you see is his cigarette hanging half out of mouth
ass planted in big, lush kissing lips,
playing with the loose skin around the image
of vonnegut's puckering anus:

some would call it a star.