things that should have been a
                   simple blip on our ecg
             have become a constant

                     razor-straight

                     scream of discontent.

      like so many books on a library shelf,
            (thanks to the dewey decimal system of our lives)
  our sins had become mechanized,
                      categorized,
                      ostracized,
              but not forgotten.

               "there are ways,"
          we were told,

               "there are ways to deal with your problems.
                there are ways to become kings and aces.
                pretty, painless, perfect ways to label,
                file, and defile your faces."

               "there are ways,"
          we were told,

               "to teach yourself to swallow your pride.
                (it's easier if you plug your nose.)
                hold your breath, take a seat.
                settle down. you'll be here for a while."

          we locked eyes, like the many times before we had locked other things.
             limbs. lips. hands. hearts.
                it was never really enough.

                   our locks have been picked,
                      mechanized, categorized, ostracized,
                         prodded and poked into paralysis --
          dewey decimaled and diminished.

          we hooked ourselves up to tubes full of poetry,
             hoping that gravity would send it dripping into our thirsty bodies

                                                but you drank Poe
                                                and i drank Plath.

          we tried to find a gauge to quantify the way we were.

                                                Alfred Kinsey had nothing on us;

                but for all our abnegation, all our consternation,
             all our degradation in the name of fairy-tale love,

          we could not create an equation that explained where we went wrong.

          we flipped frantically through the connotations of denotations,
       addicted to diction,
    fascinated by friction,

               completely smitten.

          we blew the dust off of musty pages
                  in our desperate dance over worn-out carpets,
              up and down the rickety metal staircases,
                        through the narrow pathways of knowledge.

               "there are ways,"
          we were told,

               "to fix those broken spines."

                       the ecg is screaming
                       and all we have left,

                                     infused as we are with Plath and with Poe,

                       is rows of novels about the way things could have been:
                      mechanized
                     categorized
                   ostracized

                  and real.