The television was on a loop playing a recording of Natural Born Killers
Our bodies and their contents laid naked and honest over the sheets
He breathed so heavily beside me
I could not say
He was not there
The crack in the window whistled cool air and the radiator over compensated at 80 degrees Fahrenheit, making the room an even 70.
The kitchen light was on.
The guest room light was on.
It was 5:10 in the morning
Too soon for the sun to overwhelm the hollow artificial light
I put on a shirt that I left there weeks ago
It smelled like his cigarette smoke
I brushed my teeth until the sink cloged, brimming with water and swirls of foamy yellow spit.

Lying with you after that cleansing reminded me of the first time I really saw poverty.
No facade, no escape
Too different to empathize
When he wakes up he’ll smile and touch me, he’ll say, “Hi, Baby”, even though I’m not Baby.
Those particular thoughts moved me with a bottomless felling,
So I got up.

Making my way to the kitchen, I turned off the light in the guest room
Not everything can shine
Somehow the kitchen always feels like the center of a home
Maybe because food is a thing that comes before love
The Donner’s loved.
Every inch of the kitchen was coated in foody grime
There was dirt down to every inch, in every crack
Nothing, not even the child could convince him to wipe it away.

That home felt small around us
I felt overstayed
If he woke up from deep sleep while I packed the few things I own
I know his eyes would tell me he didn’t understand
His protest would be angry
He would beg
I’d feel shameful but excited
There is no justification to stay where boxes half-stored and lazy intrude into your limited space,
Where the kitchen grows a layer of filth every time it greets you,
Where the walls close in every early morning when you get up for work and you do the dishes in the quiet.

The roses on the floor didn’t protest loudly,
But they insisted that I crawl back into bed where I belong
“You’re depressed, It will pass again,” they said.
The mercy he showed my flaws, the laughs we shared, his desperation and admiration, his love even though he recoiled, jaded when I couldn’t match him.
None of it could keep me there that morning

I do not know poetry
I know my toenails are too long.
I can feel them snag on the sheets that I haven't washed.
I'm out of toothpaste
my teeth feel grimy,
my gums raw
I waited all day to see you
so you could tell me that you don't like my sweater

You say you don't know how to talk to people who are in pain.
You are exasperated with the burden of humanity inherited by humanity
You are easy when you numb yourself constantly
Anger is righteous to accuse you
Defense is a child who is confident
All the villages you've saved but not me
I remember pain

I am so disappointed with your inhumanity
because no one can fail but me
You can read the look on my face
I can tell
So don't make me say things I can't

Pain is a vacuum
It doesn't exist in perfection
In an absence of sound,
even though it itself is so loud,
is inaudible
While I am at the bottom, God is at the top,
and you are somewhere in between
You are blocking the view,
misleading the people
You claim nothing but we demand something

When I left your house I wanted to crash my car into a ditch
Instead I drove home.

noon
I am surrounded by people who I cannot say are my friends, but who laugh with me.
Even though things are horribly, horribly, wrong-
This moment, is alright.
My head, heavy and burdened with anguish is diverted
My eyes flutter lightly
Look up
And land upon your face
Vehemently, so painfully, suddenly
My eyes drop
As if to hide from your gaze
You barely look at me, but I feel you seeing me
Everything about me becomes so apparent
My crude mouth, scowling
My crooked teeth, yellowing
My hands, fumbling and fat
I drop my head in embarrassment
Embarrassed to even exist
When I look up, your head is down too, you are smiling to yourself
You look beautiful.
The folds around the corners of your mouth show all your character
Your hand moves to your head, to brush a piece of hair away
Every movement is fluid, and perfect
Your stature radiates in its casual but sturdy slump
I look at you and think back to the Statue of  David, by Michelangelo
To me you are a spitting image
Everything inside me crumbles
I feel wrong to speak to you, though I’ve know you so closely, and for so long.
The fact that you acknowledge me, though you hardly do is humbling, shocking
All in one instant I am both crushed and appalled by you
Even without your rejection I dismiss any hopes that had lingered of our union
I realize my fantasies are absurd.
I could disappear in that instant
Slowly fade to a solemn shade of black and never be seen again by human eyes
By your eyes
I wish I had never met you
Wish you had never been dangled before me to lust after, long for
Only to all be crushed by that span of seconds
When my eyes met that smile
That god ****** smile
I pray that you leave until I can’t bear it anymore
And when you’re finally gone, the relief is sickly
Whatever you saw can’t be unseen
Whatever you’ve taken from me by your eyes and your ears is now yours

I remember when I cried everyday.
In the morning,
When I woke up to bleakness
The vast nothingness that is space
and time
and people.
In the afternoon,
After hours of silence
Painful time passing tortuously slow.
In the evening,
When the people surround you
To pick at you with questions
Murdering, merciless questions.
And at night,
The epitome of alone
Fingers clinging to clean sheets
Hysterical screaming
The constant blood
Begging God
With nothing but the promise
That tomorrow will be the same.

It’s been a long time since the piles in your backyard towered.
Filled up with tables and chairs,
Microwaves and dryers.
You never cry like you used to
Before the pills
When the pile was higher
And your hands weren’t as rough.
Some days I’d like to take those pills
And add them to my own pile
With the tattoos and scars
The piles and piles that grow on my back
The endless desert,
The mountain of spine.
All the places you can’t see
And all the places you choose not to see.
There was a time when I was afraid of you
Afraid of being carelessly adopted into your pile
Now I’m afraid of myself
And being buried in my own.

When I deleted myself off the face of the earth
And it still spun
And you were still there
But I was gone
How could you, how could…they
Keep on
I always expected one after the other you would all come crashing after me
Like children playing follow the leader off a cliff
Or the carts of a train jumping one after the other in rhythmic timing when the engineer, asleep at the
wheel, veers off tracks and goes over the edge of the mountain
Yet here I am
Lone at the pit of the valley
Staring up, not at the heavens as I hoped,
But up at you, and your life
Going onward
How can you mourn me
Say you ever loved me
If you can go on with out me
Here I am, in all your triumphant glowing glory I couldn’t even go on with you
You said I was everything to you
I picked up so tenderly each thought
Sentence
Syllable
Sound
You laid on me
I was so eagerly in love with you
And now my heart is breaking
And my tears melt my body into the hauntingly dark soil
Where other wayward people must also lie
My breath, now, has long expired
And you are not coming
So as time passes
And you grow older
And meet other women,
and shake hands
Shake hips
Write your stories
Stagnantly, I remain
My decomposing, hallow body
Dissolves into the earth
The wind quivering, and wailing above me

It’s so strange
To watch you turn up every morning
When you swear every night that you couldn’t go on for one more minute
How is it that
You want something so badly
That you just narrowly escape everyday
It is miraculous how you beg for her to touch you, even gently
As she forces herself upon countless others
It isn’t your time they would likely tell you
And I know you would sneer
Because what do they know about time
Or your time especially
But I don’t think you realize
The intensity of the blackness
That you toy with
Your restless body that you can’t keep still for even a moment
Completely motionless
And the reality of death
Is so much less of an escape than I think you had hoped for
The images of your wasted body
Will remain with the people you leave behind
And your legacy
Though it will be tragic
Will be very awkward and often silenced
And your very realness will be buried with you
A fraction of your history will consume your story
A generic message of hope
And remembrance will become you
All the poetic waves of your thought
Will be dwindled down to nothing
And whatever permanence you have left behind in your absence
Will be misunderstood and deformed
Into something else, far from your own