Buyer's Remorse For The Anti-Divorce Poem by Amanda Saveley

Eyelids like anvils
Like falling rocks fluttering
Down past my pupils
Dripping like oil
Bleeding into the earth of my irises
And pleading for sleep like a man in the desert
During monsoon season

Too much and too little
My brain is torn paper
Taped over and glazed
With ideas barely conceivable
Drunken slurs like a ten-car pileup on one line
So many broken fender tears

Naivete was my old coat
Patched over with fixed mistakes
Though some holes were just too big
Or awkward
And the ugly clock-gift of time could never break me
In my perpetual spring
Now it always feels like eternal Wednesday
A Nebraskan summer with too much rain
Flooding my already washed-out memories

Regret, you are the intermittent rash
Ever so conveniently present
Should I forget
That fairy tales are simply dusty pages
Best forgotten on broken bookshelves in the attic of my mind
With glass slipper shards and rotten apples
And narcoleptic princesses too hungover from sewing binges

And my broken childhood heart
Now freshly laid in my chest
With the stinging reminder that Santa's not real
And neither are charming princes
No matter how hard they try