You can't go on without me,
but I can't go back alone.
The fold has bent and crushed them all while staring at their phones.

I sold the dream they bought me,
if only for your smile.
The tide has swept them all away in currents of denial.

I swear I swore an oath at some point, to some ideal that seemed worth stealing, so at least I'd have a confession to make while doing all this kneeling.

This crushing ultra lightness. This heavy ever empty.
These vain puzzle pieces crashing through the vacuum.

She says she's never danced by herself.
I can't feign surprise.
I think back to our last date,
and see her face in my mind:

The darts around the room.
The delayed, half-panicked smile.

She relaxes some when I take her hand.
How she wishes I could whisk her away then,
take her to a place where no one is staring,
and we'll dance and dance the night away like some kind of dream sequence playing behind the lyrics of her favorite karaoke song.
(Or maybe I'm just projecting.)

She says she likes it when I drink.
She says her father used to drink.
I can't help but think there may be some issues unresolved.

Not enough to stop me from putting my arms around her
as we watch the paramedics load the guy with the ****** leg onto a stretcher and whisk him away.

The spiral down.
The leaking of pocketed things
swirling above towards sunlight:
3D text of a spilled life.

What you did.
Who you loved.
The things you ate and the things that ate you up.

Awakening in reverse.
A return to the obscurity from which you were born.

The sea keeps no record,
marks nothing in stone,
but sings a eulogy for everyone ever lost to it
heard from any coast.

Not the product nor conclusion, but the case that merely holds it.
The theory that posits without endeavoring to ever actually prove it.
You are but the hook, the hanger, the mannequin that displays the lifestyle you'll never have the courage to actually wear outside the store that made it.
Doomed to hide in other peoples' lives.
Relishing the moments when someone else is reflected in the mirror.

The dimpled back of the banshee that haunts your hollows,
as inescapable as the back of your eyelids.
The acid in your veins, the same pH as the bile you spent your youth spewing onto unsuspecting plants. Poor things.
Pouring whatever you can down gullets, gutters, toilets -
fancying yourself freed from the fiend that had been keening deep inside your bowel.
Romanticizing the expectorant as some kind of exorcist, ridding yourself of the demon you spent the entirety of your childhood feeding.

Then I might not have to hide my tears in the space between the wall and the bed.

One day the world will look kinder upon us,
and when the wind takes the ash by the hand
and sweeps it into uncertain horizons,
they will see that I have taken the fire they set

and made her my own child. I whisper to her
that she does not hurt me, that even the sunrises
on the horizon covet her colour. I remind her
that wounds are opened in anger but burns are
borne of grit and hope, the unwanted spawn
of pain and desire scarring itself into a dance
of fire and flame.

Then I might not have to hide my love in the space between my shadow and yours.

The Wild Iris

by Louise Gluck

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little.  And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.

I watch as the droplet eases itself
down from the wound, into a strip of paper,
scarlet on crimson. some might call it a stain,
but this is no mistake, I will fold myself
in, like blush on cheek, I will make it look real.

is it pathetic to imitate what we can never achieve?
the night sky gloats in silent mockery. the trail of
her dress drags along my dry eyes, and she burns
a hole for every jewel I cannot reach.

is it a sin to covet a sin? my fingers run along
the grooves of my carved pupils, and I can't
remember anything aside from the warmth
of a star in another orbit.

I fold my three hundred and fifty second paper star.
Does the moon believe that these are her children too?
Or are my paper cuts for naught? One day, I know
the paper will be skin and the star will be a sun.

but until then I will bleed, and until then
I will have to suffice with a constellation of scars
that glow in the dark on my ceiling.