Page 20--An Intact Poem--Liz Baudler

I’m falling apart. What a sentiment—
of the sentimental sort, I suppose,
overdone, exploding all over like
tomato sauce bubbles, leaky red pen.
No one ripped me to shreds—recently.
At least I’m a cut-up in conversation, but
Where do they dissect these things, any-
way, their jigsaw notions detaching
when you try to lift them off the table?
If the pages of your novel were fluttering
upon a paper-cutter, how much of yourself
would get sacrificed to ensure your remains?
And can you tell me how the whole operation
makes me feel, despite sliced organelles?
I thought I was compleat, short and sweet,
and now that I am etherized upon a table, I
disregard the pinning wriggle of the wall as
hallucination, a dicey sensation not to be trusted
a bit or minded at all. Expatriate, divorced from
native lands, lend me a scissors, a subtle knife
classically paring the core virtue. Chop chop.