weak for your words,
at first.

then we did.
then we were.
before we weren't anymore.

broken, temporarily.

i saw
me without you, and you without me.

i saw the sun.

i was your favorite candy.
consumed quickly,
regretfully unappreciated
upon your final bite.

you are my dreams and in-betweens,
a stitch in my side.

you are the worm on my sleeve that squirms restlessly.
you itch at my skin. you cause me to crumble.

hungry as I am, (I cannot eat),
you fill my gut with both lust and disgust.

I tried to make art but it was ugly and left me burnt.
charcoal pencils drew lucidly over charred skin.

my eyes try to comprehend the complexity of your freckles' design
(fashioned by Helios with apollo in mind.)

Sunday mornings became less and less important.
my coffee was always bitter. my milk, always sour.

I was putty in the hands of an innocent and curious child
that ran with scissors and
didn't know his own strength
or the sharpness of his own nails,
his ability to rip me apart, slowly,
and into a million loose and flimsy pieces.

I'm not half as strong as I pretend to be.
I meant nothing. I was nothing.
I am.

It would take me too long to realize that he never meant
nearly as much to me as
I always held him prisoner in my mind,
forcing him to be someone to my soul and
pretending he was strong enough
to hold the broken spirit that even the pillars of the Parthenon could not support.

I am gentle. I am weak.
I am 3 AMs and lunch breaks.

You lust for me. You crave me.
You might leave me for a while, believing I'm the only hiccup.
But you'll soon realize there is more,
(that your wife didn't stop ******* you just because
you came home with my perfume on your clothes,
and your kids didn't stop smiling at you just because
they knew my name) and you will make your return.

I am not proud that I have you wrapped around my finger,
yours wrapped around me. Or that you can hold my slender
body, only to look away when I fill the space around
you: taking me in, letting me go.

I do not last. I am eternally temporary.
I am a one night stand of sorts.

You tell your friends you hate me.
You tell your wife you think I'm ugly.
You throw me to the cracks in the pavement,
again and again and again and again,
only to ask for more. I am not proud, but

I will adhere to you always, because I long to
fill the space created by the separation of your lips.

You told stories of the UV index when it resembled the color blue,
of animal anatomies, the size of Earth, forgetting your manners.

I told you a story of maggots swarming at the flesh of swine.
I told you a story of a violent child finding maturity, maybe.
I told you a story of the post-apocalyptic world while walking through a pond.
They all seemed appropriate at the time.

Then I hated you for the ***** that was on the rug you left me to
clean, from too much red and too many tears that you left me to appease.  

We wrote and we compromised.
Looking back we never knew why.
I could hear you whisper when you thought I couldn’t.

We had wins and losses in the reds and whites.
You spoke like you knew the ins and outs of the alpha and the omega.

Your lucky number was nowhere near that number four
but both implied perfection. I was an unfortunate first.
I studied too hard for things that wouldn’t be graded,

like which strings pulled at what, and grassy trails promising return.

You complained about the snow,
so I removed myself quickly.
Everything you left me with would just have to suffice.

I drank like my father
and was
blackout drunk in my apartment alone,
calling you on the phone
asking for cheap love,
secretly begging you to do me a favor and
make me feel wanted.

So you complied
and you came here,
because I was too drunk to leave
and we watched recordings
of other people having *** on the TV.
I guess it turned us on just enough
to **** each other until sleep.

I woke the next morning before you
and I looked down at my body,
naked and exposed above the same sheets
that we ****** on the night before
and maybe even into the next day.

I stared at you while you slept under the same sheets
that we ****** on the night before
and maybe even into the next day.
I wondered if your mother knew about me.
(I was sure she didn't.)
I thought about how if I ever had a son
I would hope he would be something like you.
and
I thought about how if I ever had a daughter
I would hope she would be nothing like me,
and have to face the fate of guilt and self-hate
that society had set in place.

it was a dull december
diseased with grey and fog,
making the town look
decrepid
dilapitated
pathetic.
and that dull december sun,
so tired and miserable,
may have risked unemployment
if his employers hadn't been just as
agonized
exhausted
hopeless.