it's nights like these
(becoming every night)
when i most feel the mass
of your absence
like deadweight on my bones
you are joints cracking
easy as bumping a toe
i've looked up handbooks for
detangling a person from your life
articles, essays,
detailing the trimming process
snip snip snip
and your life will be like this:
you are alone
and your branches are bare
but your roots are still strong
and you'll spend your nights missing the leaves
but imagine all that sunlight
(you forgot what it felt like)
and your bark may grow thick
but the warmth still gets in
and your roots are learning to love the soil again
I want
to go far into the woods
where he waits. skin warm and
wet, who hears the bed quiver when I leave.
who looks at me and thinks of divinity
and bad genes.
his blonde tangles in my mouth,
tongue forked between.
sorry I didn’t let go like you asked
when you did if I ever thought-well I do
I think about the blonde a lot-
and the raspberry lips that
raptured me-
* * *
I had plans.
what plans?
marriage?
kids?
yeah.
you never said.
you couldn’t tell?
all those times asking
if it would be bad
if--
this hurts me too.
she won’t be my wife.
she won’t have my kids.
this hurts me too.
* * *
a dagger presse
I write about December
and after forty three lines
I backspace.
I recover from trauma by peeling skin
to reveal a new one. I make myself
tea, sit on my bed, fuck myself to another’s voice,
sip my tea, think about apathy, which I mistake for
forgiveness. Tonight it surges me, and I hate you,
burning my chest, filling my throat,
And I recognize that it is not you I hate,
your body, blue eyes, blonde hair, thick
wrists, but the lovely image
I contorted in my head, sweet lips, sweeter
love. A masochist whose soul surrounds
his dick, pleasure that’s moved
by aesthetic. Who wouldn’t love like you do,
Checking your ex
well that virgin never kept them from littering by Mercury-the-Queen, literature
Literature
well that virgin never kept them from littering
before this ugly, flowered couch
bobbed down the river
and came to rest
where water lapped semen
from its edge,
someone slept here unalone.
the stains in the cloth spell promises,
"my body goes here,
yours belongs there,"
the cigarette burns on the armrests
sketch stories of every
so-late-it's-early night.
the couch now sleeps with the water
and the lilies
and the riverbank,
the fish now suckle waterlogged cigarettes on
flowered, moonless nights.
and this sink, before they ripped the kitchen out,
held his dishes-
food-caked, abandoned dishes
broken in anger against
her shoulders and her forehead
and her screaming, ugly face.
this sink
"Roadways make me claustrophobic,"
I wish to tell him in ripped tights and striped blazers,
He's holding tightly to my hand -
My short, boot-clad legs trying to keep up with his muddy, shoeless feet,
We stop at the end of the sidewalk,
Cars pass by us,
He presses the button as if he's in a hurry,
Golden rain drips off of us,
Red, green, and yellow lights glitter in his eyes,
I know this because I can't stop looking up at him,
At this man I've fallen in love with in the middle of that one trip of a summer,
A day after I thought the life I was leading was turning out to be a failure,
And that I should open up my trachea,
I'm glad
sometimes i feel like
every step i take is
destroying the earth
each footprint crushes
bugs and dirt and love and dreams
i feel like i am destroying
the earth with the weight
of myself and everything i
never told anyone else
like why i hate myself
and why i could never hate you