It seems I’ve always been dyslexic
But, I really didn’t know.
I just discovered this about myself
About a year ago.
It was a matter of some bedevilment
To deal with left and right
Up and down, on and off, and more
Excepting day and night.

Opposites like yes or no, black or white,
Were never easy or fun.
Then the days of computers came along
With their trials of zero and one.
It’s a basic lack of understanding things
At a minimal kind of level.
It always seemed I was forever lost
Between the sea and the devil.

I began to realize how deep the effect
Ran within my learning curve.
It was more than just a simple matter
Of which way I would swerve
When riding a bike or driving a car;
I could never drive in Kent.
I would invariably choose the wrong way
When the road was forked or bent.

I don’t take any of this in any light way,
It helps me to understand
Having problems in my studies long ago,
To piece together strand by strand
The insults and the teasing I underwent
When I made the wrong choices.
I can now put to rest my sense of doubt
That stems from chiding voices.

It was such a subtle thing, and back then,
In the methods of long ago,
The parents and the teachers muddled on
Because they really didn’t know
That many of us were not ignoramuses
We just had an uphill fight
We had a dilemma in equal opposites
Like in and out or left and right.

I can tell you about the girl.

Her freckles were beige constellations,
and her voice was husky and rasped
like birds before the churning of a storm.

She was weird and laughed at everything I said -
which made her even weirder,
because I'm only funny in certain photos
and in certain clothes.

Her left arm was covered in scars and burns.
"As you can tell, I'm right handed," she said.
Arthritis surrounded her wrists and other joints,
and all I could think about were my
grandmother's arthritis crippled hands,
and if the girl would thank the arthritis, one day,
for no longer allowing her to self-harm.

One of her feet were bigger than the other
and, when she walked, she would lose balance.
"I'm not sure if the world is too fast
or if I'm too slow. Then again," she winked,
"it's probably because of my feet."
I liked her because she treated me like a person,
but didn't take me as seriously
as I took myself.

I struggled with self-respect
and she struggled with a drug addiction.
Her arm was needle park
and sometimes she missed ******
more than she missed me.

She wasn't the type of girl to shake
without her drugs -
she'd, instead, talk about them
like they were old friends.
She understood them
more than she understood herself.

After a few months of ***
and, "I'll be sad when you leave,"s,
I called her my girlfriend
and she smiled.
Flecks of speckled angles, bright,
I saw her, first, she accepted
my night.

Five days later,
she overdosed on morphine.
I picked her up.

Her eyes were glazed over.
I said, "I love you,
but this is *******."
She cried and said,
"Forgive me."

I lain in bed, next to her -
next to the avoidance of death.
She asked how I was
and I said, "Everything I write is ****,
but I'm glad I can write ****** poetry
about how we'll be okay."

She asked, "We will be okay, right?"

I hope.

You broke me...
& I allowed it because I so loved the moment before you uttered how I meant nothing. The moment when you could be redeemed.
The moment in which my breathe would catch in my throat.
The moment in which I desperately wanted to be inlove with you again. The moment in which I wanted to delude myself just one more time into believing you might love me.
Believing that you could value me in my human form.
The form in which my exhale became reminiscent of your name.
You were absorbed into the essence of my very being.
You were everything. & now you are nothing.
This is neither good nor bad.
It simply is.
Because you were poisonous and I loved every second of it ; basking in your presence.
I was a wilting flower and oh how your kiss felt so much like rain.
You were incomparably beautiful to me, but beautiful in the destructive sense.
Beautiful like a forest fire.
But you are not a forest fire.
You were the moon- deeply inconsistent.
You could not be redeemed.
Not by your smile or the way my name tasted leaving your lips or by the rare tears you would spill whispering a belated apology.

You were lost to me.
in all your cruelty- completely lost.

Except for when i would stand lonely in a crowded room- your voice sounding like the insecurities in my mind.
In those moments I'd choked back tears and pretended that the ***** was to blame and not you.
I'd Spend the night hurling insults at the stars whose usually beautiful form seemed a grotesque witness to my aching heart.
And then I'd want to hurt you how you hurt me,
scar your soul repeatedly but then I realised you don't have one.
You never did.

Her narrow path kept winding as she hummed along in tune
To a song no one else heard, except her lover on the moon.
She skipped and ran and often fell,
But never wondered why
Some creatures fly to heaven and some simply die.
She listened to the others but they never heard her speak.
She was brave in her convictions but they thought of her as weak.
She tried to wear a normal hat but found it way too tight,
So she spread her tangled tendriled hair and found herself in flight.
It's a very lovely planet and she left it much too soon.
And though no one seemed to notice...
There was crying on the moon.

"Our song came on the radio yesterday and for the first time, I didn't roll down my windows or turn it all the way up or sing along. I forced myself to turn it off."
"I washed your sweatshirt after sleeping in it for so many nights so it wouldn't smell like you anymore and I boxed it up to put in the top of my closet, out of sight."
"Remember when we went to the beach and kept snapping photos? I finally burned them yesterday. I watched as the flames burned out, just like we did."
"Our anniversary passed, and I didn't feel empty like I did the month before. It only took me four months."
"I'm deleting your contact out of my phone so I won't feel tempted to text you when I lie awake at night thinking about what we used to be. I guess I'll be doing you a favor, seeing as you don't care about the past us like I do."
"I hope you're happy with her, because after all this time I'm finally happier without you."

i burned hot this weekend:
one unblinking flame
in a toxic green sea.

thousands of mouths
tossing out the word "women"
as if it's the worst insult
their forked tongues can spit.

when i cut up their faces
with the rings on my fists
they'll learn "hit like a girl"
isn't an insult after all.