Underneath the coffee table, the throw rug collects dust and memories.
Twenty five years she’s had that mat and it hasn’t moved an inch
and there are creases where the coffee table sinks.  

Underneath the couch is the toy car that you lost at a distant age,
and on the shelf sits all your favorite books                
of which she read to you every page.
And by the couch sit her glasses, faux gold, frames engraved,
cloaked in dust atop the nightstand that her husband built before his grave.
And above the fireplace is a photo of you when you were young,
the anchor in her darkest storms,
you are the reason she never came undone.
And beneath that are your parents,
their names carved neatly into the box,
but you don’t talk about them anymore,
your heart barely remembers the loss.
But her heart never forgot.

There are creases where the coffee table sinks holding onto faded caffeine stains
and the pungent death of cigarettes she smoked on the night that you left
still lingers all the same.

This is where you never listened.
This is where she used to sit.

This house is a mausoleum of her life, love and effort.
She did her best to keep you safe, so how could you forget it?
All she wanted was to provide and in the end you left her neglected.
And there are creases where the coffee table sinks, right where she left it.

If life is the journey, then we are pilgrims,
hands bound and blindfolded,
stumbling to our graves with moments of clarity
and threats of immortality, scattered along the way.

It’s all do or die, no second roll of the dice,
where the blind lead the blinded with promises of paradise
through the killing fields, we walk this knife.
Conform to live, obey to survive.

Not while I’m still breathing will this world ever see me to my knees,
we’re all born on death row, I just wear my sentence on my sleeve.
Your vicious icons of god are nothing special,
these devils you unleashed.
If it’s blood that you want, you won’t get a drop out of me.

Like a travel guide embedded in your tissue,
your scars are roadmaps,
they tell me where you’ve been.
With caution, I run my fingers through the grooves,
and I feel every stone in your path
so I steer away from them
and all the places you wish to never return to.
Your memories are the passing landmarks,
and I see the sadness in every weakened construct.
I’ll never take you down those roads,
I’ll never pave my own.
I promise.

Hello love,
this here is my resignation,
my last letter of good intent.
I’ve followed you all around your stars
but now I’m exhausted and I am spent.
So broken is my body and my head is a ******* mess,
I feel everything and nothing at once,
but I wish I couldn’t feel this.
I wish that I was dead.
I am sorry that I have to do this to you,
I wish we could work this whole thing out,
but it’s been so long since your head found the clouds
that I’ve lost all hope of it ever coming down.
And I don’t know what possessed you to think I was so durable,
I was never meant to bend to that degree,
but I was too busy navigating your tempest
to quell the one inside of me.

My thunderous heart roams a dead and forgotten land,
longing for her voice, to guide it home
from its shipwrecked solace in the sand.
She is a burning visage, the only vision at my godforsaken end,
a haunting future foretold by a bitter poet’s tongue,
the teeth marks upon a feeding hand.

To dust, I crumble as I claw my way back to her open outstretched arms,
She was a lighthouse upon the horizon, a beacon silhouetted against the dark,
But she isn’t real.
And if I can’t believe in her ghost long enough to find my way back home,
would I not be living proof that in the end we all ******* die alone?

We all die alone.
We all die…

ALONE…
I crossed the plains, by myself, I braved the tempest,
carried forward by a promise that I would find you there
but your head and heart lack a center and so you shift like restless sands,
just when I think I’ve found my needle, you disappear into the haystack again.  

IS THIS WHAT LOVE IS MEANT TO BE?
AN ENDLESS DECAY INSIDE OF ME?

And this loneliness you left me has consumed me like a hunger,
I feel it salivate as it tears the flesh of my mind asunder.
Your emptiness has taken me to the depths of the blackest sea,
whose mouth floods into twisted rivers and lays waste to everything inside of me.  

But I’m done playing slave to your specter,
mourning what is and what was never meant to be.
Who knew chasing your ghost could take so much
so much life out of me?

Upon this ship abandoned, I pariah, ambitious conqueror,
ventured into your sea, heading for your coastline
anchored by a sailor’s fabled dream,
that a boy returns a man and finds you there waiting patiently… for me.

But instead I found a darkness, the golden sands, a blackened beach,
my bones carried forward by the tide, hands stretched toward a paradise lost
and forever out of reach.

I was the Nemo of your heart, the captain of a vessel doomed to perish, wrecked upon
the shores of your shallow love, where I found myself captive to the cadence
of a siren’s soft vocal and slowly ripped apart.  

The stillness of your waters still beckons, a dream so serene,
But it’s the darkness of your deep that scares the living **** out of me.

We haunted the boulevard in silence,
lamplights dull in the night of June,
eyes wide like walking disasters
our lights died inside of us too soon.
Our bones they ached with every footstep,
somber skeletons stained with broken flesh
monuments to the scar tissue,
that’s all that we had left.

You cried then started laughing,
but I could hear the pain inside your chest
as you couldn’t remember the last time that you had slept,
slept in your own bed.
And you said “I miss home, wherever that is.”
I wish I could’ve told you it was inside your heart,
we were a long way from there now,
but at least we could’ve had a place to start.
But where do you start when picking up the pieces?
When there’s oh so many shards?

And oh the shards they no longer fit together,
worn away by what they are. And what they are,
are just phantoms of who they used to be, our fathers, our idols,
they threw our lives across the lawns of the houses
we’ve lived in since the day that we were born.

The same hands that raised us couldn’t tame us,
I’m sorry we weren’t born to be like them
they’re our fathers, not by circumstance,
but just like everybody else,
even our parents leave us in the end.
But without them we wouldn’t be here,
I wouldn’t get to hear you laugh,
I wouldn’t get to see the warmth in your tragic eyes
or even hold you in my arms.

And I would trade a thousand lives
just to spend this moment with you,
dying on the boulevard in the dull lamplights
of this night in June.

Streetlights,
a false confidence.
The shining, shimmering idea
that there’s somebody looking out for you.
But it’s still black when dawn invades the dark
and as your night ends
mine stretches well into the sun.

Gutted,
you silent monument to a happier time and place
hang beneath a sky
that promised bigger and better things.
And time has not been kind.  
Your coat has cracked under duress
and the softest wind takes pieces of you when it leaves
like ashes in a plume.
The sun does not smile upon you.
It burns.

There’s a depression in my bed
where last you lay your head
and I still roll over in the night
just to catch your scent.
But it’s fleeting,
fleeing
and once the mattress has finally reset
the depression will still remain
only it will be the one inside my head.