six years,

in the most pathetic, tangential way,

is guilt. is shame. is vivid hate.

burning the belly of my metatarsals

each second succinctly souring the next

each step, walking against the tide of an ocean of barbed twine

teeth bared, claws bitten like a captor’s hand

smiling like this is all reason to keep going.

a bravery owed, debted to the ones who found out about you.

what cannot kill me can only make me wish it had,

letting my lungs collapse against a fist;

much easier a burden after all.

a tangible foci for the pointed vile thoughts.

can’t blame yourself for not knowing better when the blame is a man in his early thirties,

standing in the line in front of you,

hair a cascade of spilled oil,

smile believable, tooth crooked forwards.

tall, taller than you’d thought,

hands softer than I’d said,

kind words forming from lips so often pressed against mine,

hymns, promises, lies.

hate. shame. guilt.

•

six years,

six years,

six years,

how

can my body,

(though knowing

in every way

it has

betrayed

me

before)

still find ways

to love

you?

memory

is warm,

I know,

I know,

I should

know better.

I should

know better.

I should fucking

know better

after all of this.

all of this.

fuck you.

fuck you.

I don’t

know

how

to

do

this.

I miss

you.

•

01/20/2025

•

What the fuck is wrong with me? Rhetorical.

it was always easier, than this.

I could write a thousand odes to each,

gooey and warm and tepid,

all tasting of passivity and cacophonous monotony,

interchangeable.

(the people, not nearly so,

as varied and with intent such as they are)

but the language of my memory

has been mimicry.

mirrored media,

creation tainted by glasses stained rose,

unknowing absolution within the poems that I wring from hands left cold,

knowing the grey, but stealing the shadows from theirs,

leaving larkspur where acid once fawned,

begetting the same bare, collective love story each time,

a cathedral emptied of water and wine, hollow and echoing against the glass and the stone, the ghosts of perdition settling below the nave, pressing loss of God betwixt your navel.

there is no room for growth within these tales,

but at least they did not hurt to tell.

•

it was always straightforward;

butterflies, tangerines, summer days,

kisses on the back of your throat,

hands, fingers intertwined between the layered grass in your grandmother’s backyard,

bourbon on our tongues, taste of cabinet stolen,

lunch in concrete daytimes where everyone knows you and I am your possessed silver grenadine,

promises of future moonlight dispensation,

forgiveness like blind crickets,

crooning to a saviour long since forgotten.

•

words that have long since lost their foci.

•

but you have grappled my pupil,

lead my willing hand against yours,

coincided with the stars I have long since beckoned for resonance,

truly are winter ground cherry,

taste of winding catacomb pathways,

sweet like decay and pressed petals.

you hold me with fruition,

patience and consideration,

lead me to the sun and winter winds with trust that I am intricate and will not unravel so easily,

you do not yell at me when I am weak,

do not expect me to be absolute,

forgive me when I forget how to be strong.

I want to press my cheek against yours,

take your bones into my carcass,

find a way to intertwine ever abysmally into the deep,

show you the thorns and the twine,

and forget how to pretend.

•

prose of you is difficult to procure, in sincerity,

but the falling?

it has never been easier, than this.

•

12/29/2021

•

You wrote me a song – let me return the favour.

The bones of the boxes on your mantle

speak of whispers,

interlocked fingers,

unlock the back door and let the light in,

promises made unwilling to take back.

I twist syrupy threads of conviction

that stem from the gaps between my teeth,

sopping sterilized scripts unable to find purchase amongst the crystallized proclamations of partnership

that throne themselves

atop your paws.

•

The crackling, venom-seeping gash

within this whiplash cage of bone,

fucking screams for it.

•

Who would want me like that?

I am undeserving of icing-sugar-decay,

calls of the virginal succubus against the throes of a tepid plane that venerates the holy,

the christened palms of someone porcelained in thick bristles of lust and love,

fed fat with pickled fruit and kept hot in your charcoal spitfire.

I had forgotten the circle, the forever,

the cicadas that sing amongst together.

•

I turn sick, turn sinful,

cage in thorns the one who begs for eyes who burrow deeper,

become a creature of begotten lechery,

casting aside the god that lies within connection,

and wail at the planets above that I am so horribly, terribly, unforgivably unlovable.

•

For now I bask,

a rotten parasite that craves demise more than paradise,

in the glow of your soul,

remember I once was here,

and pray that I still belong here too.

•

??/??/2021

•

Isn’t that just the way it goes, though? Finding what has long since been forgotten, and not feeling guilty for forgetting it.

It was nothing,

to you

•

But you told me

that you would set everything I knew aflame

and nursed your coal soul inside of me

and I stared at your closet;

at your checkered button-down,

the way it hid behind all the others,

forbidden fruit.

I was land-locked,

a ship with creaking hull

and the ebbs and flows of your body

finding ways to keep me from running.

•

will I ever forget

the way you treated me

like I was a given?

•

I am so fucking good at keeping secrets

but you did not ask me

if I wanted

to keep this, no.

How many months

have I convinced myself you didn’t do it?

watched it over and over,

running water through my neurons,

told myself that it was love?

that it wasn’t taking, if it was yours?

•

but your skin still haunts me,

checkered shirt skeleton in the closet,

and when I see a blue Cadillac with a hand propped against the opened window holding a white lighter,

I become the moment; I ghost.

remember trying to claw away,

telling you to fucking stop,

remember you pinning my hands to the side,

remember wanting to scream so loud that my voice would melt away like ash,

remember not being able to.

laying there, staring into your closet,

feeling your linens staring back,

audience to my ego’s demise.

watching you rip my mango soul from my spine,

the both of us silent against your moans.

•

I’ve scrubbed everything I once was,

from the reflection I see,

and I (sometimes) call this body my own –

I hope it stays like this.

with each snowfall and sunlit storm,

I arrive from that moment into my own,

without you.

gratefully, and hauntingly.

when my corpse is complete,

your hold will be rotted vine,

and the fruit I will bear

will be so fucking sweet, baby,

with the plumpest, juiciest part of it being that

you’ll never get a taste.

•

06/23/2020

•

Might delete this after posting. A little more vulnerable than I’m used to being.

I was an uncertain form floating in gloom,

stellar gestalt under a pear frond,

and you painted the branch

that I loved most

and we nurtured

and we matured

and became whole

through the time of our own

although distant as dust,

tethered through greys and through neons,

a singular dot, upon our cheeks,

beckons us back along these paths

that we entwine in.

•

The smog since consumed,

when the tree crows called for tolls,

and slumbering, restless, encapsulated muddy shoals,

and a strike from the dark.

Why? Why?

And your teeth only sunk deeper.

Rat poison. Open wound.

How do I make this venom clean?

•

And now it is a dance:

(in the way of wind and leaf)

pretend that you haven’t sawn the branch off,

package the poison in my pocket,

placate, place your words in my throat.

•

The place where we used to blend

now leaks sap and oozes oil,

tarnished; corrupt.

The forms who sit,

alongside the pear tree,

cannot see the carnage.

cannot feel the wet, ill produce

drip, drip, drip,

onto their own faces.

They say, “it is only liquid,

you must clean it up yourself…”

as it seeps into the throes of my nerves,

rattles my teeth from their home,

acid on an exposed vein.

•

The only nearby voice who recalls

my disheartened wails

in earnest, with healing,

is one that I met last Tuesday.

•

So I have learned ‘alone,’

have encountered attempted pacification

of my turbulence,

have shared a kindred spirit with duplicity.

•

Where do the branches meet,

I wonder?

Will I be at twig’s end

until time itself

heaves an exhausted sigh,

and wilts?

Or will I wilt first?

•

12/19/19

•

I’m very tired.