Sometimes, I figure out where you hide,
inside,
and it is a bullet wound, entangled in spider plant limbs
and sappy with aloe vera,
nestled in a brass record player,
the stylus propped in place by brown woolen strings, repeating it back again –
PERFECTION.
•
and aren’t you?
The way you hold in this world,
fingers tracing the crevices and knots
like you’ve been here a thousand times over,
plucking at cobwebs
as if they’re your own,
refracting the sunlight into countless rays of glow and glitter, colours I’d never seen
until your arrival.
•
How I long to hear you again,
prayers to become enveloped
within your light,
crawl out of the shadows it has created.
Oh, how the moss has grown in it.
Sapped the dank from the forgotten niches,
and turned into fungus of the most wretched kind.
•
You had him, once or twice, this I know.
How I’ve quivered within this, with petrification, planning a comeuppance for the theft I perceived you orchestrated,
reminding myself
of what was once taken from me,
although, you do not take.
I know,
and I watch myself disregard this,
a notion wilting amongst the tepid waters.
•
Whence you came, so you go,
and I forget where we were sometimes.
Golden hour at a local brewery,
you shading your eyes and
laughter like wind chimes and
a second home, with a ghost of its own
and I cannot hate,
how could I?
•
But I am carcass, I am leftovers,
the back of the fridge,
third hand of your grandfather clock,
timed and exposed neon,
hand-me-downs in an opaque black bag,
nothing much,
nothing capable nor palpable.
•
nothing compared to you.
nothing for you.
•
Sometimes, I crawl into the wound,
agitate, bathe in the muck
and irritation,
fester.
Allow myself to drop
to the bottom of the wastebin,
content myself with watching you
not even peer down into the deep.
I am sick, aware of it,
but cannot climb out alone.
•
PERFECTION, PERFECTION, PERFECTION,
an echo from the sidelines,
and I cannot disagree.
•
You are everything I want to be
but you are already there,
so there is no space
left for me.
•
03/27/2020
•
Hard times call for hard measures. Pull the thorn out sometime.
Tofu 