Not Break-Skull Man

Sinking down into one of her

Over-stuffed-leather

Cherrywood-backed

Meeting-room armchairs,

I'm thinking.

As I stare back into her

Red, crystal-studded

Cateye glasses,

I'm thinking that this woman believes she gets shit done.

The room hums like a hive

With this thought.

I smell it in the musty, overflowing filing cabinets

Which loom like bodyguards

In each corner of the room,

In the precarious stacks of paperwork

That teeter and sprawl over all 15 feet

Of the black-granite-topped meeting table

Which she heads like a queen.

While my eyes hum with this evidence

Of her omnipotence,

She's staring me down,

The queen,

The doctor,

And I am experiencing an impending sense of doom.

(My blood is glutted with poison

That makes my eyes feel like they're sliding out of my head.)

This woman is

Overstuffed leather,

Hungry lion,

Leaning back and staring at me

As if I'm a piece of nicely-cooked meat.

I have to say something,

To keep myself off the platter.

"Why do you do that?" I say.

"Do what?" says the queen.

"Stare at me all the time."

"I'm not staring at you, I'm just looking at you."

She smiles serenely.

I notice that her teeth are very yellow.

"Well, it's giving me anxiety," I say.

"Ah." So understanding.

"Annabel,

Let me tell you a story," she says, "I

Used to work the night shift

At a psychiatric hospital. There was a man,

A break-skull man,

Terribly thin, and nearly blind.

He suffered from schizophrenia,

So it was hard for him

To sleep at night.

He spoke of a great shell

That rotated above his head in the dark, pink and sickly,

That wanted to suck him into its depths,

Where he would lie, contorted like an infant,"

She says, smiling, "When he spoke, his eyes drew circles in their sockets,

Tracing the spiral.

I would listen to him every night

Until his medicine pulled him under.

Break-skull man,

Every night,

Contorted like a child."

(I perch on the edge of the platter, teetering like an infant.)

She says, "I finished school and got a job as a psychologist.

I said goodbye to break-skull man.

He pulled on my sleeve before I left

And said, 'You are the only one who

Has ever looked at my eyes.

The other doctors don't care,

They never look at me. It is a beautiful thing

To feel your eyes, and know you care.'

He said that to me

And ever since

I treat everyone

Like a break-skull man."

The queen is glowing.

Her lion-yellow teeth glint off

The snapping, green lights

That she had fixed on my face.

(I am not break-skull man)

So, gathering my entire scattered soul

Behind my own lights, I shoot daggers

At the queen.