I am forgiving you like dawn.
A gray, dark and terrible like death
And grass wet and cold
Give way in a pink burst I feel low in myself.

You are still out there somewhere,
and someday you might grab another girl's hand
and drag her, giggling, to the roof of an old theater.
She may gasp for love of you,
breathing hot stars that forget to burn.
I hope you have learned not to break her
And that you now cradle trust, fragile and beautiful.

Careening, cavorting through the expansive terrain,
The prey that you seek darts far faster than flame.
You were not raised with a hunter's eyes,
And lo, a failure will fail the harder it tries.
I have trained hard and long how to trap alive
This creature you seek, with no will to survive.
The secret you lack is to let him roam free,
And wherever he'll roam, he'll return to me.
You can scream, you can rail, whinge, moan, blister, and punch
But it's under acceptance his resolve will bunch.
You'll find your own, I'm loathe your bubble to burst,
For each, only one hunter, and I got here first.

I will buy a wedding dress,
and I will send a letter to all the people I ever loved
and ever loved me
and it will say "I will be at the courthouse
in my dress
and I will marry the first one to show."
If no one shows,
I will drink a bottle of wine to myself
and dance in the dress until I'm covered
in nothing but cumulonimbus.

You forget to notice
as your memories become museums.
Encased in dust,
your settling or someone else's,
it covers all the photographs you say you need
and all the papers you won't part with.
It only takes so much before
the fond caress of a frozen, flat, familiar face
becomes the hundredfold tracing of a ropelike scar.

Eyes dumb and wet like mudwater,
Eyebrows twitching like
dog legs in the road
and I want to hurt you beyond comprehension.
Boil away the pity
and the tar is hate.

Staring down the street
framed in high-contrast light like a faded sign,
a blur to my eye
that makes me wonder if it's shared,
I watch a man advance towards me from the bus stop.
He wears an old fishing hat, pale as paper,
whether I mean him or that hat, I don't really know.
As he gets closer, I realize that with every step
he is slowly crumbling.
He gives me a look
that lives somewhere between desparation and apology
as first his leather shoes
and then his ankles
fall to sand.
He speaks, a thread so fine
it barely winks in the sepia glare,
"All you have to do is hold me,"
and his lip trembles with tearless fear.
His eyes grow impossibly blue when I grab his arm like a greeting
and he slides on me like an oil tattoo,
then into me without struggle -
visible just barely under my skin.
I carry him with me to my car
mumbling, mumbling,
"If only you'd stopped walking.
Nobody had a gun to your head."
From inside myself, I hear,
I am the gun.

The little injustices serve to remind me
That you were not, never were
The plan. No,
Not even when things were light and my heart sang
And I could ignore, gloss over that one tuneless note in the refrain
Could I believe we were fate. I had to follow that lie to survive
The cold, thick swamp his rejection left me in the will.
Then I believed it like it was where I wanted to be.

You are selfish, but never cold. You make a mockery of me
With no thought, knowing I am Artemis
And telling your cookie cutter lover to tie your memory to the moon.
You weep when you hurt me, and your tears slide down
Almost as easily as your zipper will for the next flatterer exhibiting lordosis.
You can't help yourself, maybe, and so I wanted to sink under your failures
Instead of taking responsibility for my own success.

I will always love you but I have never needed you.