The sudden left turn we take from stanzas two to three is pretty damn brilliant. There's a lot on your mind in this one, even more than usual, a lot that you want to make clear. A lesser writer would have faltered trying to tie all this stuff into a single, searing perspective. It would come out reading like two different poems trying to pack themselves together under one title. You don't even look at that pitfall for a second. This one moves us all over the place in your mind, and it's a hell of a great, well-written trip. Stanza three is definitely the stand-out part, too.

No one can make falling apart seem so beautiful and easy as you do, but yet, can make a reader feel so much pain at the same time.

"i made us pancakes today/with the kiwi you bought but keep forgetting to eat/ripeness passing us by" Only you could take an image as routine, mundane, and typically mechanical as making breakfast ("breaking the fast" of sleep -- a point I didn't miss in its relevance as the introduction to the rest of this piece) and, with one line -- a simple addendum, nearly parenthetical, stated almost as if it was almost not stated at all -- and turn it into one of the most cutting, devastating, wrenching observations made here or anywhere. "ripeness passing us by" -- god, I know this, I know this all too well, this emptied-out feeling brought on, of all times, after having made a meal for the one you love. The line "with the kiwi you bought but keep forgetting to eat" tells us all we ever needed to know about the other in this piece: somehow those 10 words paint a description that any additions to would be redundant or superfluous -- I have been this person; I have been in love with this person. And the fact that a kiwi is the crux of the imagery -- no doubt because it was so in real life, but no less the most ridiculous of fruit -- makes this stanza even more powerful. What has happened here, what has gone terribly wrong in this relationship, that a kiwi fruit is capable of setting off a cascade of such magnitude? That's it, that's all I have to say about this piece. What follows that first stanza is good (possibly a little more disjointed than what would best serve the poem, but it needs to be disjointed and in any case it is very powerful), but you could have followed that first stanza with last week's shopping list and it would not change the tremendous impact of those first five lines. As always, love, thank you for sharing.

... this is so very exceptional.....