Vine-Ripened.

i am the tomato 
tonight reeling 
turnstyle in the city 
a tornado flung like rain into canyons and valleys 
in the desert and down my elbow the crook still on fire from remembering 

the tornado and the tomato you fired at the wall that night in fury and 
feeling that we were finally ripe and just right and raw and exposed and bare-fists we would fight. 

it must have been time to harvest and uproot me and my mess and bloody my walls and leave me like discarded and decaying mold spores all time-honored and crawling up hiding and blackening slowly my ceiling. the time had come for bobbing and weaving when you got to be both the butterfly and the bee and 

i was the tomato torn up and turned out in a first-round knockout by Mr. Muhammad Ali. and so it went full steam-ahead and so did you with your agenda and produce-wielding and you cleared a pathway for feelings all seedlings inside to spring up and out from the vine of your twisted mind and see the sun and sprout and shout the words that left me feeling so much worse and numb like beige jealous of you for saying it first and controlling and masterminding your exit and my eventual demise 

like overripe and undue time spent on our forbidden and fruitless vine now futile and vile all but dead except in my mind. in truth, i am not above this way of thinking- of mindless comparing and ink-wasting inquiring of my mess and that of the tomato victim jane doe really... as i am dismembered disgusted and unremembered by you and long gone from the walls i once marked as the proof of my life- now faintly stained and covered by fresh paint and your new girlfriend. i'm truly no better nor worse off i guess... 

than the seeds and the guts from the food blood red and sinking down the wall with a sickening sound and still dripping like the storm drain sewer runoff sound of droplets falling after the storm had come and long since stormed off again the splat and the sputtering pitter-patter sounds of seeds and tomatoes slain viciously now sliding down my kitchen wall so obviously a bad imitation of the aftermath rainmaking noise overhead the leftover drops just condensation and air and nothing that amounts to anything of mass like the ashes and dust of what is and what was and the site of the storm so suddenly 

borne of food and of rage and of rain-making days spent carefully caging and coddling and then denying your feelings of fury and fateful karmic bitchslaps you couldn't have written or scripted it unplanned or whatever it was you were thinking or not thinking by throwing me too like the tomato you threw at the wall left for some poor maid or me to rinse off and kiss it and make it all better and 

if you find her please send her my way if she would come if you still have the number and the zip code and still can remember how fresh was the stench of rotting vegetables in my kitchen and flesh and still i need someone to make it all better.