You took the words
right out of my mouth
and then shoved them
down my throat.

And to you,  
it's just an afterthought,
a nod into space;
but I'm standing here
breathing oceans of static
in the small space
between us;
trying to fill the void.

You didn't hear the love
spilling out from the spaces
and cracks between my words.
You couldn't hear the apologies
in my silence.
You didn't feel the way
I held your name
on the tip of my tongue,
and really, I don't blame you.

If only to appease you,
I'd crawl back to the shore
and drift back out to sea,
dissolve into a memory.

I just hope that you might
remember me
the way I used to be.

Borne into a frenzy
of sleepless black nights
that coil and surround me,
where chimeras and serpents
glide like paint,
in the sea that separates
the mind and the horizon.

I flail and sputter,
treading naught
but black water.
Just leave me here for awhile.

every word that comes tumbling out
of your superfluous lips
is loaded with wholesome irreverence,
weighing leaded and cruel upon my heart
by the pale recycled light of the moon.

déjà vu lingers before my bleary eyes
again,
as crumbs of flightlessness
slip through my fingers, again.
and I can see you unfolding us,
dissecting us, laying out all of the pieces
in a heart-wrenching vivisection.

and I know you can't really **** something
that's been near death for years,
but when do you give up
on resuscitation?

you played me like a mandolin,
striking notes like broken glass
in the space between your wayward sheets.
your hands were my compass,
your eyes the Adriatic Sea-
and I plunged into the depths
like an albatross,
fawning over wide open spaces
and beautiful colors.

yes, you played me like a symphony,
my body ebbing and flowing
in ghastly syncopation.
notes like honeysuckle and lilac
coursing through my bloodstream-
capillaries to venules to veins to the vena cava
and straight on into my heart.

and you'd be ecstatic to know
that I haven't heard such a haunting refrain
since you went away.

but it's difficult
when everything
around you
is so beautiful;

beautiful and fated
for disaster
and decay.

you sound like broken glass
and your hands..
your hands,
are otherworldly creatures
roving over my flesh
like so much unclaimed land.

I smile, I hate you.
punched out cigarettes
lie smoldering in the ashtray
and I thought I could hear
the point of impact
in your hurried sentences.

I'm not worth the trouble,
I never wanted this anyways.
I just wanted to stand
at the edge of where the sea
meets the land and
taste the air in May.

I just wanted to know
what it
*felt like.

in a city that breeds hooligans
ingrates and indecencies,
where the architecture of a lost era
crumbles into brothels and madhouses,
where shootings peak
with the heat of summer,
where new windows are boarded up daily
and we chop down trees like fanatics,
in the city I call home,
in the city I love,
destroyed by its ignorance,
I am condemned to silent pleas
and empty stares.