Sometimes I picture myself in a red prom dress,
with converse under the tulle, and glitter
covering my eyes as I nervously glance
away from your face, inches from mine,
trying not to stare at your crooked bow-tie.
Sometimes we’re jumping over the tide’s
foam, under the moonlight, licking the salt from our lips—
my saddle shoes on the dunes, your jeans rolled
above the ankle, but my curls falling loose around my face.
Sometimes we’re moving black and white photographs,
1920’s with fringe and silver canes,
and sometimes
we’re like this. Naked on your mattress,
with the ceiling fan at a standstill, sipping
stale beer from old bottles you left lonely
on the windowsill. And sometimes I know better,
but tonight I answered your call and I came over
to your lazy bones on the sunken couch,
watching the lava lamp’s goo stick to the bottom,
yet still lighting
the entire room with a neon glow.
By now, you think I would know
that I can never count on you unless it’s cheap,
and convenient, and broken, and me. It’s only
ever me, but I can’t just haphazardly
stay in the spaces of your life that need filling.
I picture us, hugely, with a white house,
blue shutters, little kids building towers on the porch
just to knock them down.
The whole bit, picture it! But all
you ever see me as is figure
that you can reach if you squint hard enough—
a mirage that you like to believe
only you will ever hold.
Sep 30, 2014
Sep 30, 2014 at 4:05 AM UTC
You were never the kind
Of person
Who could
Get comfortable, who could settle down.
I felt the uprooting.
You set fire to this house
You let the smoke rise,
Before you warned me of danger.
Only when you were safe,
Could I be warned.
By then it was too late.
I had already suffocated.
Sep 30, 2014
Sep 30, 2014 at 4:02 AM UTC
I still walk past bridges and imagine us jumping off of them
Maybe it would feel the same when we hit the bottom
As it does when we speak to each other.
Do you know what it feels like to watch the walls of your house collapse onto your shoulder blades?
I used to love to watch you skip over the puddles trying not to wet your feet
It was the same way you held your hands out of the car window on the freeway
Flying, so fast.
You told me " i dont care what anyone thinks "
but the truth is-
i hate the way you hold your breath before you laugh at my jokes
like you're about to blow out a candle but you're just not quite sure you want to watch the flame go out
I hate when your eyes disappear into the ceiling of your bedroom -
the same place your dreams go every night
as they flash and turn into lightning bolts of images of who you used to be
In them are your screams
They are the sounds of your alarm clock before you hit the snooze
You told me you were happy
if happy is a place where babies cry and bees go hungry because flowers are dead.
and thorns capacitate roses, weeds overgrow petals, and dogs bark endlessly into the night.
starving and cold.
the way you look at yourself is the way I look at you too
shivering and crooked like a bad park job
I imagine your promises like a sealed letter without a stamp to the wrong address on a Sunday morning
your voice makes me violently scratch at the roots of my follicles and fight with myself over whether to submerge my head into the beads of the water or to just finish conditioning my hair
your laugh burns. it echos through lobbies like elevators waiting to be pushed and children waiting for the waving hand of their mother to slowly dissipate and dissolve down the winding road
I remember the sound of eggshells crackling underneath my feet walking through my living room
Wishing that the panels on the doors and the fibers in the carpet could speak to me, or Ask me how my day was
You became the fibers in my carpet sewing my pieces together holding my lungs in place filling them with oxygen
And then slowly just letting them burst.
Sep 30, 2014
Sep 30, 2014 at 3:53 AM UTC
i wish my words came out more beautiful.
so i could help you to feel pretty.
Sep 30, 2014
Sep 30, 2014 at 3:39 AM UTC