I could tell you about my life, but that would ruin the mystique.
Poets seem to pride themselves on being dark and deep.

See beneath the surface,
and the first thing you would think:

Here's the epitome of failed friendship -
definitely one I shouldn't keep.

They're pushing you to do it-
To finish what you started.
They're giving suggestions and making edits.
Performing audits.
They're saying,
"Maybe if you just changed the wording here, the theme there, the meaning throughout, added more heart to it."

It's clear, and to be honest,
They care about it more than you ever did.

There's a difference between being with someone, and loving someone.

There's a difference between having a place to sleep at night, and having a home.

There's a difference between being lonely,
and being alone.

In and out of it all night.
It's over before it begins.
Supposedly, there's someone up there right now
keeping track of all our sins.

Let's give them something to stack the pages with.

So when it's read back to us at the end,
we can convince ourselves
it was a hell of a life we'd lived.

A truth was told.
The world wasn't ready for it.

A truth was folded and filed and tucked away for a later day when it'd be needed.

An urn was molded.
It was turned and kneaded and glazed
and filled with the burned ashes of a truth the world never needed.

A tour was organized.
A collection of scholars in things eclectic and obscure
observed things they'd never been privy to before.

They took notes and wrote essays for graduate programs they'd never be accepted to.

They wrote about deep-seated issues that drew connections from me to you.

But they never got published.

Like trying to find where you'd put all your ****
days after cleaning up the place
while you were drunk,
I've been attempting to relocate
the various pieces of my forgotten heart.

I warned her at the start.

"Let's take it slow,
because I don't even know
if I can still do this,
after being alone for so long."

Lately, I've been stressed.
Hard-pressed to convey how I feel,
because all I feel is immense pressure to suddenly perform this boyfriend role.

Even though,
for the first time in what feels like forever,
I'm the one in control.
The scales are finally tipped in my favor.

But I take no solace in the fact
that the shoe is on the other foot,
because the longer this goes on,
the harder it is to ignore,
that when it comes to this kind of thing,
someone always gets hurt.

When I lived alone,
my biggest battle was leaving home
to do the things I had to do in order to feel some sense that my life was my own.

Talking to you
is just some necessary evil that I feel obliged to do
in order to feel like I'm part of the world.

Because the alternative is
a certain kind of insanity that I've
spent the last decade trying not to associate with.

To put it simply,
I don't want to end up like my parents.

And I do what I have to do in order to convince myself
that loneliness is not my fate.