His name was slapped across my moving boxes
the last label and favor he ever gave me
But sitting in an empty room, clear carpet
Except for his sickly guts across one corner
(Second to last parting gift, yaking new year!)
I saw that I had
hit refresh.

All my belongings:
Bed,
Clothes,
Pride
Were puzzled into a car ready to never return.
So I
steam cleaned the stain and
swept each Newport fragment from the porch and into the boxes,
X-ed over 7 letters,
and plopped them down in the dumpster.

I used to think a clean break was an oxymoron
And moving on, a cliche
But in my new room,
even my mind is pristine
because no dust of our past remains.

They say that after the Big Bang
It was a myriad of collisions that began to form our universe.
Masses of gasses hurling into each other,
not to explode and dissipate
but to violently combine and form
the entirety of existence.

On one of the floating specks
Formed from those chemical crashes
I exist
Constantly searching
for something
anything
with which to collide.

Dark, warm bed
After bed
After bed,
Ingenuine, primal ******
after ******
after ******,
and I return to my cluttered mind
More unsatisfied and lost than before each orchestrated clash.

My biggest fear has always been car crashes.
Stories of dead families strewn across a ****** highway have haunted my nightmares since I could strap in my own carseat.
But they also say fear is love
and now at twenty,
I embody
Shards of broken glass
more than a walking soul shell
that mistaken minds call a body.

And as I lay touched and swollen,
with the taste of too many someones' in my mouth,
I think I might crash a car into a star and see if maybe then
instead of aching as a million pieces I become violently whole.

Wine breathing dragon of sadness
Another loss to the gain of my madness

I hope everything is too quiet for you to handle,
My absence both too dull,
and too matte.
And every room too empty for just you and our cat.

•Don't be a stranger•
You try to confidently murmur.
But you already turned down my goodbye.
I don't know whether to be consoled by the ground or the sky.

Buried
But I feel spared.
Everyone tells me it'll be okay,
But there are certain words I know I'll miss that only your body can say.

In the wake of November,
with summer in slumber,
the men in your head start chatting.

One feels inadequate,
a young boy scorned by a father who mistook rage for love.
"Sometimes I just feel so small."

Another performs,
measuring approval in laughs.
"Laughing at me or with me, it's still about me."

The most dominant smirks,
cigarette in mouth, leather jacket clad,
too cool, too tough, way too cinematic.
"Hey, kiddos."

And in unison they chanted: "We won't face our fears, we won't solve our problems."
Instead they all turned their blue eyes
to a new girl
who, with a camel crush in her eighteen year old hand and
insecurity in her walk,
cannot yet distinguish that there are
many not one.

"Hold me."
"Hold the applause."
"Anytime, honeybaby."

One day in a park or your bunk bed
she'll see
you're too afraid to be you.
After all,
that's why you couldn't love me.

Every man I've tried to love,
shouts back as they trudge away,
"I ******* tried!"

When I'm drunk and heaving
repugnant half- sentences
in a parking lot
too stubborn to
crumple into their suddenly forgiving arms,
they turn around with the same
pulverized pride.

And I remain staring at the
confetti of conceding
under my feet.

You drive me home
(And yeah we're half-******)
When the sky is pink
As the world is so much colder
Than the warmth of your sheets

Sometimes I think I'm just the
Concealment of your lonely boyish fears
(I snuck into your sketchbook
Where you drew yourself alone
With a black broken heart)
But even after I scratch warning signs into your back,
You pull me in just a little bit closer
And open up just a little bit more

I’ve heard that phrase but it never rang true until I was ****** and trampling down a path lined by trees and the sky was lit by the brightest moon I’ve seen. I was cooped up in a ball inside my head, carefully pulling on strings to move my limbs. He kept colliding into my side, each time I hoped it would catapult me somewhere else, but it only seemed to result in his hand on my shoulder. When we reached the black water rushing underneath the bridge, I wanted to sit and think of all the sleeping fish and imagine a big but friendly swampy monster, but instead hands on my back attempted to rub my knots out. Knots are better bitten and undone, ripped out, cut. But instead I sat hugging my knees with his **** hands attempting to untie me.
But I can’t be unraveled by a stranger. One time in a dream “unravel’ was tattooed on the back of my hand. It must’ve been a message from Jupiter or the Egyptian god Ra, or someone or something much wiser than I giving me advice I cannot even comprehend. But I like to think, that last night it meant that you’re the only one who can unravel me. With just one look from you, no hands necessary, I could be assured that the world was right. The moon isn’t meant to cast shadows, and firecrackers are not meant to explode underneath my feet. The world without you makes no sense. The world without you is a nightmare I can’t wake up from. The world without you hurts.