Restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows.
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
What did I know about drowning or being drowned?
Sorrow is my own yard,
And in short, I was afraid.
My life will shut very beautifully, suddenly
When everything broken is broken, and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt and the heroine has studied her face and it’s defects
Who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks,
Who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessively,
Who jumped off the Brooklyn bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten.

I used to pray to recover you
Who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard, wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts
Who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation.

Your most frail gesture are things which enclose me.

At twenty I tried to die.
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.
Watching the others go about their days, likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears that self-love is the one weedy stalk of every human blossoming.
How do they do it, the ones who make love without love

After you ignored her legs that she held clamped together so tight that magnets would be jealous of the strength she possessed to try and keep you out,
Did you confuse her groans of pain as moans of pleasure?
Did you not see the tears of shame glistening on her face?
Why didn’t you listen to her when she yelled for you to stop because of the pain you were causing her?
Is having *** with someone as she lays anything but still on the floor comfortable?
When she dug her nails into your flesh and bit with teeth into your arms, releasing the pain you forced on her, returning it into the monster who destroyed her,
Did you think that was permission for you to start again, when she had yet to finish fighting you off for the first time?
How did you confuse her silence when she finally laid still because she knew she could not push you out from inside of her as enjoyment?

There are pictures of naked bodies
Bouncing from one cell tower to a different cell tower.
We live in a world where technology allows us
To see each other’s bodies long before we ever
Climb under blankets and have the privilege
Of exploring one’s anatomy in the comfort of the dark
Instead of through the mirror of a small bathroom
Where if you’re lucky, she might have included her face.
It’s too bad the boy or girl she sends it to still won’t know
The color of her eyes or that she scrunches her nose
When she’s mad or that she has the deepest dimples when she laughs.
Your body is more than just a screenshot that the receiver will take.
It’s more than ******* in the extra bit of sand
Inside the hour glass of your flesh covered skeleton.
It’s more than standing a little taller, arching your back
So that the cage of ribs protecting your heart show through
The lens of the camera.
Your body is more than turning to the left, then turning to the right
Because you’re trying to find an angle that makes you seem even thinner.
There are boys who only know how to love you as they hold their phone
With your picture in their eyes and their hand touching their own body
When they could be touching yours.
Do not allow a boy to love you through a picture because if a real man
Wants to love you, he won’t ask to see your naked anatomy before
First seeing your face and knowing that your eyes are blue,
That when you laugh, your dimples grow as deep as the Grand Canyon.
Do not allow yourself to let a boy love you through a picture that’s
Bounced from one cell tower to a different cell tower.

The first night you stayed in my bed until the sun rose the next morning,
I was afraid to fall asleep out of fear that you wouldn’t be by my side
When I awoke the next day.
I lay on my side, you on your back, and my cheek on your bare chest.
I listened to your heartbeat like a loud lullaby trying to pull me to sleep.
I watched your eyelids, waiting for them to crack to see if I had fallen to slumber
But they never did.
Your chest elevated up and parachuted down in a perfect sync
With the heartbeat drumming in my ear.
Occasionally, I walked my fingertips softly up your chest as if your body were a mountain
And my fingers were hikers exploring your beauty and landscape.

I shook the devil’s hand and looked him dead in the eye the night I put the barrel of a shotgun in between my lips
While I stood on the edge of a chair with a noose around my neck.
Killing two birds with one stone.
The feathers of the bird deep inside me would be ruffled after the bullet raced through them,
Shearing them apart like a combine moves through a field of corn.
The bird on the outside of my body would finally learn to fly after the bullet struck the inside of my mouth like a flashlight lights up a dark cave harboring a family of bats
And right before I fell limp to the floor, no longer able to hear my own heartbeat inside my ears,
The noose caught my fall, tightening around my neck.
The night I stood on a wooden chair, holding my own death within my hands in complete darkness around eleven because I wanted to be an owl instead of a raven,
The chirping inside of me wouldn’t quiet.
I heard the voices of wings outside the window in the tree I’d thought about soaring from; telling me to stop or cheering me on, I don’t know.
But if I would’ve put the single round inside the chamber of the gun or slipped the slightest bit from the chair,
I’d know how it feels to fly.

This is just to say,
I drove to the cemetery and visited your grave today.

A tear rolled slowly down my cheek
And in my legs, I grew weak.

In the air, I felt the warm breeze,
And I knew that you were watching me kneel upon my knees.

The clouds rolled away and the sun kissed my face,
I was used to distance, but this was too much space.

I ask for forgiveness for being such a wreck,
As I touch the dog tags that now hang around my neck

There was no way that I could understand
Why I was left holding a folded triangle flag within my hand.

I cursed the war that brought ruin to my life,
I cursed the war for claiming my wife.

“Here, have a drink,” A man slurred.
A tall, red, plastic cup of heavy smelling alcohol hovered in front of me, like a moth around the flickering flame of a candle.
The cup laughed in my face and dared me to grab it; the peer pressure pouring off of the drunk’s lips was like a buzzing fly that wouldn’t leave me alone.
“No thanks,” I told him.
“C’mon, it’s just one drink.”
I sighed, because I’d been down this road before.
Because just one drink can’t hurt anything, right?
It’s just one.
One that allows a drunken ******* who otherwise has no control over women besides offering ‘just one drink.’
But the flashback that started playing inside my head was a movie screen that felt like a drive-in film where everyone was welcome to watch.
Except they couldn’t.
These drunken “friends” on the TV inside my head who I’d been with a few months ago had wandered off with their own boyfriends, leaving me
Stranded and vulnerable, like a car on the side of the highway without any flashing hazard lights warning other drivers that I was parked there.
They abandoned me.
And who knows how long I would have been stranded until a car decided to pull over and approach my vehicle, tow straps to carry me away.
But he didn’t save me from the other passing cars. Instead, he hauled me around a sharp curve of the long stretch of road,
Left me as a wide open target for his own truck to smash into me, leaving me broken and battered, with no witnesses to call the police, an ambulance or a fire truck.
I was left all alone, bleeding and scarred in the dark curve of the highway where this drunken driver escaped without a single bruise or tear on his body, unlike my own.
“It’s just one drink.” The intoxicated stranger pried at me again, feeling his question burn into me like a red light that just wouldn’t turn green.
“No,” I said and turned away from the drunk.
It was the first time I said no to the smell of dark liquor and whatever was hiding beneath and dissolved into the liquid that was harbored in the tall, red cup.
I said no to being victim again to a ******* drug.