I don't know when and where our intimacy turned into strictly contact but
Its been years and I'd still prefer to shuffle barefoot along broken glass
Because I don't remember the last time you kissed me goodbye.
You've never asked me to stay the night
And your bed is starting to feel more like a concrete slab
But your hands are a prison I haven't been able to escape.
No matter how much you love someone
You can't make them love you back
I can't ******* bear to think of you leaning into anyone but me and
Now all I can do is speak goodbyes to everyone I meet because
Every time I've spoken the word "love"
And genuinely meant it
It's started to sound more like an apology.
I once opened your door to tell you I could not kiss you anymore
But you swallowed the words right out of my mouth.
Remember the time you told me
You wanted to witness a train wreck?
Well, look at me now
Look at me now.

You are a bottle of champagne
saved to be opened on New Year's Eve and
I am the bruise you woke up with
From that drunken night that
you'll never cease to regret.

I am a monster who is trapped
in varying levels of confusion, desperation, hypocrisy
Slamming doors in the faces of anyone
who offers me a purpose.
I question if love knows the word requited
because of how many times I've been able to find
purpose
But only in the bottom of an empty bottle while
Sitting tongue tied in a vacant room,
Fantasizing about the peacefulness of the cemetery a few blocks over.
Maybe that's why God stopped listening
I've looked into so many eyes
So many god ****** eyes,
explained my ghosts
struggling to make sense of the monster I am.
It's not that I've lost touch with empathy,
But putting it into words
Would be describing depth perception
to a blind man.
I once watched my father spend hours in front of a mirror
I couldn't tell if he was laughing or crying
but I've grown so familiar with his actions.
I am a monster and not by choice,
who was broken with love only once
and since then I've learned to walk with cracked bones.

Boxed red wine and the stench of cigarette smoke
seeping through the cracked door of the back porch
brings back memories of childhood
Another hole in the wall resides next to the liquor cabinet
the size of your father's forehead
You wrote a novel on your wrists with your fingernails
about the stitches he needed from the fall
You wept to me
Saying the fissure in the wall felt
like the countless hours your mother spends
in front of the computer screen playing spider solitaire
She forgot to ask how your first day of school was
for the second year in a row
You don't remember the last time she slept
You said every night spent in that house
taught you what the inside of a coffin feels like
The photograph next to your bed
of a smiling family of four
taken on your seventh birthday
Whispers a story of a mother who refuses to speak
the name of her firstborn child and
Writes its own eulogy
about a light that was put out
fifteen years after it was ignited.
You said time does not heal wounds
it just furthers you from who you once were
what you once had
Now you wake up every night gasping for air
after dreams of a devastated car wrapped around a tree.

You once admitted to me you'd never want to be like your father
You've grown to look just like him
Maybe that's why I don't recognize who you are anymore.
I remember that night you finished off half a bottle of *****
You kept crying and muttering into the bathroom mirror
"stop looking at me like that".
And to this day I swear
The thunderstorm we heard that night
Was evidence of God
But I still don't know if he was weeping for you
Or for me
Because every time you spoke the words
"I love you"
It sounded more like a cataclysm
Than it did an affirmation.
You once admitted to me you'd never want to be like your father
Yet you left me without saying goodbye.

My favorite pastime is imagining
How you managed to stumble home
That night Whiskey left you alone,
shivering, white knuckled,
unable to remember how to spell your name.
My phone rang that night,
Although you never spoke to me after leaving
that slurred, three word voicemail.
Your laugh is a resident in my mind
And I know my name seems to sparsely visit yours
But I just can't bear the weight of emptiness anymore
After you replaced me
the same way you replace old bed sheets.
I just hope you'll one day know how it is
To be struck like a match
Just to be used and thrown away.

I sometimes think it is unfortunate
That nothing escapes my pen but tales of an unrequited love.
I wish I could write about
Why I have not stepped foot in a church
Since the day I found catharsis in the word "alone",
The first time I truly felt safeguarded
Or the first time the word "divorce" shattered me.
I wish I could describe
The smell of a chilly fall night with crisp air and rain-dampened pavement and how it inaugurates autumn
Or the remorse felt toward a child who let go of his balloon to be left to the mercy of capricious winds on the Fourth of July.
But instead I am stuck incapable of writing anything but run-on sentences about Loss,
Why the burn of whiskey tastes better than that misconception of 'home'
And turning cracked pavement into metaphors about heartbreak.