Imagine loving a sober alcoholic Gemini biker with a chipped tooth.


After you are together for eight months, let that sober alcoholic Gemini biker with a chipped tooth take you out in to the ocean, when the waves are cresting at six feet and you are terrified.  You almost drowned when you were a child.  He tells you to come out further.  Turns his back on the wave, just like your father said never to do. He looks you in the eye and says I will never let anything happen to you, I am not him, you can trust me, I will not hurt you.  
So you dive under the wave and he has you in his arms and the sun is expanding through the water droplets on your eyelashes.  It’s cold but not too cold and it feels clean.  You believe him, and believe that nothing is truer than this moment right now with the salt drying our lips and tangling our hair, nothing is braver than trusting someone despite the past.  This is one of the greatest days of your life and you never want to leave the coast or his tattooed heart because this is what is real.  

Imagine that you two part several weeks later.
Imagine that he begs for forgiveness.
Imagine that you go back.

Because you remember the beach and that day.  And every day in its consistency when you are together, and how your anxiety subsides, just for a little while.  Things do change, for a week, maybe, but then the past arrives reading The Book of Power and she is hungry.  Wrapped up in memories, she plants a green kiss on his cheek and he leaves you in the water to drown.  You are treading water trying to seem like you are swimming but you are failing, failing miserably, and when he finally drags you to shore he doesn’t pump your lungs with oxygen, he watches you choke as everything comes up.  He tells you that he loves the past and he is waiting for her to come home and always has been.  
So now, you do not even have the past.  He took it from you and everything you thought was real.  You cannot tell the difference now and ask and ask Could he have loved the present, just for a small while? Does he look at your chair in his house with his dog and think of her? When he looks at the ocean, does he taste you?
You are the past, too, just not the right one.  

Imagine this but do not live it.

Quips and quibbles of
A teenage heart
Drip drop dribbling
Through my chest as
Teardrops made of rain and
The screech of tires
And flashing city lights
Pour through my veins
Running writhing wriggling
From soul to stomach
Twisting turning
My mind is
Sick with
The feeling of
Nothing

Because
My heart is
Iron and ice and ire
Steel bars separate
Emotion from
The streets that lead to
Freedom and expression
Release
And Happiness rots
Alongside Rage
Molding and mildewed
In the deepening darkness
Where Rational and Reason
Locked them up
Long ago

But I?
I have no reason
To feel this way
My love-sick stomach is
Always fed
And university walls
Surround
My head is
Bewildered,
Brilliant headlight-beams
Blinding my
Aching eyes as
I stumble home
Twelve hours of
Class and work weigh
Heavy on my
Mind is hung-up
On him
Again

Still mostly
My life is
Fire and whiskey
And friends
That burn off the
Chill
And soften the scars
Except on these
Winter nights when
Alone in my room
Blood pounds cold
Through shrieking veins
White-water-whipping
Whirling and
Storming through my
Soul and I
Know

I am nineteen years old
But my teenage heart
Isn’t so hopeful
Or naïve
Anymore

Where are you,  knight in shattered armor?
The months seem like years.
Do you not notice the time?
I do - it is my constant companion.

Occasionally I see your “mood eyes” (as I call them),
when mine close at night.
Piercing blue and sometimes gray,
those tiny windows to your soul.

I remember how they sparkled mischievously
as you performed your magic in my parents’ kitchen;
laughing at my child-like awe
as I watched you pull out my card.

Do you know that you have ruined the word “coconut” for me?
I can’t even look at one without thinking about migration.
Sometimes I wish I had that effect on you,
where you can’t even look at something without going back to October.

It’s the little things that haunt me:
your hand on my shin,
that spot between neck and shoulder,
three kisses in rapid succession.

I wish I could haunt you,
come to you as a ghost in the night
wrap my cold arms around you from behind
and breathe love into your ear.

Would you react?
I doubt it.
Your heart is already cold as stone.
You have forgotten the warmth of my love.

I cannot be doing with this peering into the darkness
This wondering and dreaming is a little tiring, my darling -
As tired as the dusty cornflowers, once upon a time, beguiling.
Your heart - perched and sat - is being wasted, love pouring
Upon something that will be, nevermore.

Sometimes I wonder what you are doing.
Then think, it does not matter to me.
Sometimes I wonder why you are even in my space

My words, they cease to rhyme
You!
Are always on my mind
Is this me in decline?
This feeling its so sublime

Sometime I wonder what you are thinking
Do you sit and wonder about me
Like I ponder about you
Wondering what you do

Do you like me
Remember the soft touches
The passionate clutches
The lovers embrace
You lips on mine I still taste?

Sometimes

I do wonder what you think
When you are not near me

I am glad you will never leave my side
I love you.

Somtimes I do wonder.

I hope it drowns out the screams of reality
To paint happiness with a youthful brush
Replacing my childhood with happier memories
A forced fantasy
A dream rather than a sober possibility