I know you.
Sometimes you say things, expecting that I won’t understand, and I think it’s strange because
I know you.
That’s what this is. I know you,
And I want you,
And I care about you
Anyway.
I want no one else.
You might not know me,
The stanchions you use to prop yourself up eating all that I have fed you,
In the darkness,
In the night,
But I know you.
And I want you anyway.

Sick with the stars that shine in the sky
The sky you could be looking into
The stars I handed to you, fingers broken and trembling
With pain and rage and hope
Sick with the winds and the rain
Howling around me, lashing into my skin
Wind that whips long wet strands of black hair to cover my eyes and renders me as blind as I willed myself to be.
It wasn’t you who plucked out my eyes but my own treacherous fingers,
Driving into vulnerable ocular orbs, fingers cutting into the tender cells making up flesh before tearing the organs free.
Rain slicks down my skin, renders my clothes too wet to move, heavy and frozen in the night.
What is there to miss?
What is there to rage over?
What about you could have possibly left me bereft?
You are a dragon guarding the last of its hoard of treasure, nothing there but a few measly coins.
I am a traveller starving, fistfuls of air all I have won from you.
And I gave you the stars, though they burned my mortal eyes.
And I gave you the sky, though its weight cracked my shoulders.
But giving can’t be regretted without becoming a judgment on the giver.
So I gave to you and I would give again.
I suppose regret comes in around the edges of the wound —
Closing, praise to god it is closing —
And goes something like this:
“I still wish you had wanted to give to me in return”.
But life is so little about our wants.
I want you to be happy.

She loves you more than I will,
And Lord knows but you don’t love me.
Her circular curves –
Filled with such verve –
Blind so you can’t hardly see.
You could try to escape,
You tail-eating snake,
But your own misery
Is such better company
Than us mere mortals can provide.
You stew in your own **** unhappiness –
And I could be wrong,
To hate you for it,
But **** being right anyway.

I want to be above myself.

I want to be beyond myself.

I push off from the ground, one skip, two,

Desperation behind the grate of my sneakers scraping against the pavement,

And then it takes and I heave myself into the air, flying.

I am above the clouds, above the swirl and eddies of white condensation forming mountains, forming rivers, mimicking the ground below,

But still the pink stripe of the setting sun is higher,

Still the sun is higher.

Still immolation is beyond my reach,

And flight fails me as I fall back to the earth.