Defragging his Mind by Victor Henry

Women want mediocre men,
And men are working hard to be
As mediocre as possible.
                              Margaret Mead

She’d dumped him without even an explanation.

She said, It’s not you, it’s me.
He didn’t know what to do; he was in a panic, he was destitute,
He felt like he was going to die. He felt the knife embedded in his heart.
His brain buzzed; his amygdala responded.
It didn’t want to fight and it didn’t want to take flight either.
It decided to sit this one out.
His poor mind didn’t have a clue where it was.
When it consulted his body, it knew.
He had gut wrench and his heart ached hard.
Thoughts seemed to come out of nowhere, from undefinable places.

He had been wounded in war so he knew his body knew pain.

Once, in high school, during a varsity baseball game,
He’d been beaned in the head by a pitch
He couldn’t get out of the way of.
He saw more than stars; he saw the universe running away from itself.

At the end of his ninety-day self-examination period
He had defragged all of his bad memories,
Replacing them with silence, secrecy, and seclusion.

My poetry and prose poems have appeared in Misfit Magazine, Dead Snakes, Homestead Review, The Paterson Literary Review, Red River Review, and Slipstream, among others. My book What They Wanted was published last November 11th, Veterans Day, by FutureCycle Press in Lexington, Kentucky. http://victor-henry.net/