pour me a drink
from the grooves
in your hands, honey
i'll lap up your words,
sip your oceans
like wine
because i only find solace
in salt water hallucinations

and you
are the only form
of intoxication
that doesn’t make
me seasick

A month after radio silence,
seven cities away,
I heard you were with another girl
who was nothing like me.
I was told she resembled a koala
and that she laughed like a three car pile-up.
For a second, I thought maybe your red truck was involved.
I don't know why this caused me to lose sleep.
And still, I lay there
haunted by your phantom touch.
Thoughts of your hands refuse to yield
to the tangible distance of mine.

As such, I compiled a list of things to think of instead of you:

1) In 2014, Toyota recalled 690,000 U.S. Tacoma pick up trucks, model 2005-11 due to a rear suspension part that could break and possibly puncture the gas tank or damage a break line.
I guess that's why your breaks were always so bad.
And now you're with a girl
who sounds like the aftermath of devastation.
But hey, you're the one who has to live with that.
I actually hate all red trucks now by extension.
And now I'm thinking of you again. ****.

2) Red is the 5th most popular truck color.
I see it everywhere.
My heart beats faster in fear that one will be you.
It sinks when it's not.
But that's not important.

3) Kangaroos are part of the marsupial family.
They have begun to overpopulate in Australia.
Some have started to mitigate this by eating them for dinner.
Koalas are also marsupials.
I think they should be added to the menu as well.
It's not as though they ever contributed to anything.
All they do is eat and embrace being a pseudo-bear.
This is what you're dating.

4) In Spain, they use the endearment
"Tu media narunja"
which translates to
"You are the other half of my orange."
I always liked that.
I told you this in the letter I sent you.
But that was one of the letters that was returned.

5) Psychosomaticism is when a person starts to suffer physical illness
due to mental or emotional anguish.
This made me start to wonder,
people say that you can't die from a broken heart.
Maybe we have just convinced ourselves
that it was other factors.
However, we all know that the body cannot survive without a heart, and so if one were to give his or her heart to another,
and the carrier hypothetically took it to a medieval stretching device
and ripped it apart,
it would only lead to the conclusion
that broken hearts do cause death.
Maybe that's not the best thing to think about right now.

6) Buddhism.
The more I read about it, the cooler it seems.

7) Koalas can survive on a diet of eucalyptus leaves.
Eucalyptus leaves are poisonous to most animals.
That's just not normal.
If koalas went extinct within the next week,
I don't think I would mind. I'm starting to hate them more and more.


8) We went to the zoo when we first started dating.
I told you then how I didn't like koalas.
They're viscous troglodytes.
There's a picture of us from that day
placed in a collage I made for you.
It was still hanging at your parents place last I was there.
But that was back in November.
You probably took it down.

9) This list of distractions has failed at doing what it was supposed to do.

No matter how intent I am at being productive enough
to distract myself from your absence,
everything that didn't remind me of you
now reminds me of you.
I'm trying so hard to move on with my life,
but I can't stop thinking about
how much I hate
that you moved on faster than me.
That you don't miss me the way I miss you.
I'm still dealing with the loss of everything we were
and you already replaced me with a ******* koala.
I became everything I always wanted to be for you
and you became a stranger.
I hate that this list of distractions
just further validated how ingrained you were
in my whole world.
But ****...
Never mind.

There is a pain inside my chest
It slowly unfurls
To show its hideous face
And yet its not hideous
It terrifies me
Because its no manifestation of a physical condition
It is the child of the small imbalances triggered by the moving of a thousand suns and their descendants
In mysterious ways

There is a pain inside my chest tonight and I cannot tell you how much it hurts to have not felt this before
To see and think and feel the way a hundred thousand have done before and I'm going insane
Stuck in this battle inside my head
Roars of machinations faraway and souls so close to my own it terrifies me

There is a pain inside my chest
It wants me to live again
A demonic beast
With a distilled heart of magnificent proportions demands action
And it lives inside all of us
We simply learn to live with it, like some lifelong pain of heartbreak or the smell of flowers you liked or the the warmth of the sun upon your skin after a long winter night or

The smile on a face so akin to mine
I'm looking for definitions but I'm out of words now
I need a gun and bam
Shoot myself where it hurts the most
But I won't
The pain inside my chest is a story
Of a thousand years
Of pain
Of suffering
Of loss
And the slight cracks from where light escapes and flirts with the darkness
And the life that emerges out of nowhere to defy all
To defy even god
The pain inside my chest is the same as the one inside yours
Veiled by a smile
Or thoughts
Unavoidable disasters
Manifesting its own life, its sorrows and tears
Its own joy, its own love and its own sun

There is a pain inside my chest
Guess this is what it means to be human

IT rains like snowing,

                    straight down,

reflecting in silence of the fall.

               knowing,

       following,

IT finds me,  

instead of me finding IT.

A. J. Rain

Now close the windows and hush all the fields:
  If the trees must, let them silently toss;
No bird is singing now, and if there is,
  Be it my loss.

It will be long ere the marshes resume,
  I will be long ere the earliest bird:
So close the windows and not hear the wind,
  But see all wind-stirred.

So, you grew up,
leaving me Peter Panning for gold
amongst the grit of adulthood.
Your guitar gathers dignified dust,
while mine puffs and wheezes
yet another senile song,
an arthritic dog
treading painfully in step
with its selfish, thoughtless master.

I never envied you your brilliance
because it was shared, it was ours
but I've been toasting marshmallows on the embers
far too long.

And now your real life,
the one you've worked for, studied for,
sweated for
(and the one I've studiously ignored)
is to carry you over the sea
and away.
I have no doubt it is still your brilliance
that paves the trail,
But it's for others, now
and that is fine.
I am reconciled,
and full of hope for you and yours.

Let's see now:

G, B minor, C...

There's a song in here somewhere,
I know it.