Although I never looked closely, there's something in the Bible about cutting off the hand that causes you to sin; tearing out the eye of the same nature and casting it off.
Have you heard of it, dear? Last I checked you were a non-denominational Christian.
So maybe you have, but you're too pretentious to say so. It was always like that with you: you left things out.
It's quite interesting. I stopped believing in God around the time that I met you.
Do you remember? Two years ago, the walk home, too many dandelions. They crawled up through cracks in the newly antiquated sidewalk. I couldn't focus and you were too focused--an antithetic situation.
You were my savior for a lot longer than you should have been.
There was a shrine to you inside of my mind, with 300 steps and stone pillars time hadn't been kind to. It was like an image from a textbook, but a little more fuzzy around the edges.
Hell, I think I prayed to you; you were just as absent as the God you believed in, so it was easy.
But you're just an man.
Maybe that's too strong, maybe
child would be more suitable.
And if you're human I am almost certain that I was at the other end of this spectrum of religious allusions; one of your demons, or maybe even all of them. I represented everything you couldn't control. I ate away at you; I was the devil on your back and under your eyelids.
I can't go away. You painted me as this sort of ugly creature and put it in plain sight, and though you never looked at that cursed painting, you cursed at it a lot.
I'll be ******.
But unlike you, I can always convert. You could disappear completely from me, washed away,
If I wanted you to.
And I did. I cut off the hand that caused me to sin,
I tore out the eye of mine that remembered
The veins in your hands, your bony hips
the curvature of your face, your lips
And I never saw them again.

1:44
I feel empty.
there was a sinking feeling from my throat to my stomach when the ball dropped.
nothing has changed at all, really.
it's 15 minutes from here to anywhere you would need to go. things were supposed to happen and not supposed to happen and still happened.
I didn't expect this at all, any of it.
but here it is.

time does not exist in the parameters in which humans set for it. there are no days or nights, they are man-made, like factory goods.
who decided where one orbit ended and the other began? who decided that we all make resolutions that last as long as a scrape on the knee?

i'm alone in the dark again as a new year begins. again. a well-kept secret is screamed in a foreign language, and I've taken a few years of it, but I don't remember enough to fully comprehend the message.
too bad.
I didn't say anything as the ball dropped. nothing seemed right for the situation. the new year began silently.

12 dec: yesterday,
he sat behind me, crying. his eyes and were puffy and red and I asked him if he was all right but he said
nothing. it's predictable, it's overlookable.
I thought God, God, god,
but he's non, non,
non-denominational.
how pretentious.
i "use the lord's name in vain" because i've accepted my vanity, learned to cope by belittling myself in the dark.

there was a certain serenity in his chaotic demeanor, if that's possible.
he wrote with such affinity, such pressure. abundant was the adrenaline and passion which coursed through the veins in his forearms as he scribbled.
something's...different.
he's wearing glasses. are they his father's? I considered the prospect because I thought he might have asked to borrow them to hide his tears.
"I didn't know you wore glasses,"
(never in three years).
"I got them yesterday."

19 october 2014, 22:31

I didn't mean for any of this to happen. in fact, everything was supposed to be different. show up for one night, plan it all out in your head, a preconceived novel. but we tore out the pages long ago, by our own choice. we agreed that we didn't want this to happen. but now i'm having second thoughts -- it is a blessing to have a map and a curse to have it lead somewhere. he was an atlas and you were a tiny triangle drawn to represent a mountain. the men around the table all have shoes i could fill, they talk about the box that came in the mail. but i'm getting ahead of myself with this surrealism; you didn't ask for it, in fact, you hated it. you wanted the poetry out of your head but it was
stuck
there. I wrote it on the inside of your skull and now it plays every day: as you're on your way to school, as you're sleeping, as you're playing with her hair. it's faded to a gentle hum but it still drives you insane.
the cracks have been sealed, the mirror replaced. this is not somewhere you want to stay.

10/3/14

I had a dream that you led me out of the fire. you were there to save me, it was nothing new.
but how do I measure the distance between my head resting on the pillow and the words that came from your mouth? they were: "come on, it's not safe here."

you don't like that you can't control the way people feel about you.
but she and I both are clinging to your belt loops, and you're trying to cut off your pants to get rid of us, like those helping a car crash victim with a fatal wound.
we are a million miles away from the ocean and the desert. in paradise, there are fields of wheat, but here, there are only
parking lots. grass grows through the cracks,
no one's stopped here in a long time.

I will not forget
how you made me feel.
I will not remember the times that you screamed in my face, you said "there's no hope for someone with weak self-esteem and a strong sense of perception."
I am not afraid of heights, but you were afraid of me. or maybe you aren't anymore.

10/27/14
say it once more, out loud, or as many times as you want:
"I did not think it would happen like this."
there are seven billion people on the earth right now, and that means about seven billion god complexes, each above my own.
there are things that aren't supposed to be said, and things that are crafted to be left behind. I always compared myself to one of the latter, but now I realize I am the suitcase. I am the hotel shampoo that you leave in your bag only to carry it to the next hotel.
those little bottles have seen a lot.
so have I -- well, enough to know that when people say "don't look down," they mean it. I compiled a list of the ways that I could have said goodbye, and then tore it up, letting the little pieces go one by one from my hand out your car window as it speeded down the thruway.
there are good lights and bad lights and lights in between -- warning lights. if there are no sirens, how can you tell the difference? red is not a color to mess around with. and please, whatever you do, please don't get it on the walls. people will get the wrong idea.

I love the way he types and the way he uses punctuation in a form that makes it so I can read everything in his voice.
and when we talk he leaves his walking stick at home, he keeps his coat off. the last one had his hood up before i even opened my mouth.
he is superior, he is mature in the childlike sense; he wants to be so. I want to believe that he is.
a long time has passed since I've written a poem about anyone else but that last one. you can't really call this a poem, though. it's more of a disorganized string of thoughts. it is a compilation of my strong but contradicting feelings for a person who I was warned would want to be more than an stranger, more than an acquaintance, more than a friend. but I don't like warnings, I never have. I decided to make my own decisions and in doing so created my own problems.
He runs to help me in shoes that are too big, probably his father's. I have no expectations and no inhibitions; he brings me a band-aid and I love him back, until the last wave of jovial companionship passes.