Titan of Tears

You are the Titan of Tears,

sobbing to the unforgiving milkman

who breaks your mud crusted bottles

and spits curdled milk into your mouth

from malnourished cattle. 

He crunches around broken glass

with his scuffed leather boots on your front porch

as you watch from a hole in your living room wall,

losing your first piece of dignity,

and the last of the sanity carrying you since age ten.

You are the Titan of Tears,

crying to the cutthroat poetess

who refuses to send your estranged sister

a collection of milk-soaked poetry.

She burns your Janus-lines in front of the mailbox;

stanza by stanza, the ash coats your mouth

like lipstick for the damned,

spiraling into ash as she waltzes away.

The Titan of Tears —

you whimper on peeling porches,

sealing your hurricane-ravaged front door

to block out strangers who walked away months prior.

You, Titan,

who only feels clean while flossing ‘til you bleed out

in the harshest of summer storms

because you believe your great God is washing

sins out of your matted hair and thin teeth.

You, Titan,

whose childhood feels never-ending like evening traffic.

Childhood is the milky smoke

seeping from your dying neighbor’s chimney in the blue morning;

adolescence stares at you

like glassy eyed pigeons outside of your office window

as you sob into your cold black coffee.

Your lacking adulthood is full of sloppy attempts to silence.

Barking dogs in your slush brain,

pushing down the bile that rises in your flaking throat,

as water floods your eyes like a basement during Katrina,

and feeding worms writhe out of your flared nostrils, 

covered in snot and blackened discharge.

You are the Titan of Tears;

your weeping rivals Mother Mary’s bloody tears.