When did I become a joke to you?
When did I become the person you build up and up,
Only to tear down piece by piece by piece?

When did you start thinking it was okay to mess with my mind?
When did you start thinking that I was the perfect person
To break down and humiliate?

First I became your diary,
Then I became your therapist,
Next it was the advice giver
(Even though you never listened),
And now I’ve become the one you pretend to make plans with
Only to cancel at the moment you're supposed to arrive.

What gave you the idea that any of this was okay?
I’m so tired of the drama you bring.
I’m so tired of trying to help when you won’t listen.

I don’t think I can do this anymore
I don’t think I can be your friend;
Not if this is where it leads.

We planned an entire day,
And yet, here I am,
Writing this poem while watching TV
As I sit at home alone.

If you were looking for my breaking point
Then I can congratulate you on finding it,
You’ve finally hit the last straw.
No more!
I’m done!
This isn’t what friends do.

To you
     who are afraid of heights
   Not because you're afraid to fall
   But because you're afraid
     you will not know how to get down
   Because sometimes you need to
     when you've been way way up
               You can keep chasing the stars
               But you will need to feel the ground
               Don't lose someone who makes you feel so.

Do you ever think about the boy who loved you with his whole heart?
Do you ever think about the boy who let you turn him into a monster?
Do you ever think about the time when you yelled at me for getting my hair cut?
It was over skype, while you were on vacation with your family
I wore a hat for three days to try and hide it from you because I knew you'd be mad.
Do you ever think about the time you told me I was selfish in bed?
Do you ever think about the time you told me I made you feel like **** because you were a grade above me but we were taking the same biology class?
Because I quit taking science classes that year
And recently I took one again for the first time since we broke up and I realized that I'm good at it and I like it, but there's no time for me to catch up enough to study it in college.
Do you ever think about all the times I tried to get my emotions out on paper and how you either laughed at the improbability or told me it was disgusting?
Do you ever think about how you told me to stay in the closet so that your parents wouldn't be upset?
Do you ever think about the night when you called me a monster and screamed on the floor of my bedroom, beneath my desk?
Do you remember how I held you for hours on the floor, even as you clawed at my arms and legs?
Do you ever think about how you taught me that love was giving up everything, becoming some guy I never was, to make somebody else happy?
Do you ever think about how that could have ****** me up?
Do you ever think about how we had *** every time we were alone together but you never once kissed me?
Do you ever think about how you couldn't tell me you loved me unless you called me Chauncey?
Do you ever think about what you did to me?
Because I do.
Oh my God, I do.

I wake in this city
This city that didn't bear me
This city that didn't raise me
And yet it's this city that i seek to find something of me
Not in the pubs or the clubs or the karaoke bars
Where revelers conspire to dream and drink to the stars
Nor the cafes where poets and artists in a foreign language create.
Pass the market stalls where secondhand books and vinyls are stacked like freight
It is to the quietened streets of the old town I go
Where i long for the walls to speak once more
To reveal their hidden histories
To help fashion some sense of a man
One unknownst to me, my fathers father whose name I share
A fine skilled seamster, thus a tailor by trade
Not arriving to this city for work on fabrics of nylon and silk
But to stitch and sew the flesh of limbs in a paramedic corps
Another pawn of the Great War under King George's command
Driven only by economic necessity from a penal homeland
Not of conscription, politics or some moral conviction at play
For the price of neutrality is one that poverty simply refuses to pay
Returning home to an Ireland of hostility or silence at best
Medals now lying deep in pockets not proudly pinned to chests
Irish heroes don't fight in a British war for a King's crown
No such stories from father to son shall ever pass down
And now, a grainy photograph, three medals for a sons son to take
A dog tag that bears my name, a number and RC to depict a faith
From a man exiled in his home as a forgotten prisoner of war
To honour a legacy i find myself in this city afar
Asking the same questions of him as to me
Is this city the last place he truly felt free?