You texted me this morning
When the trees were being assaulted by gales
And the coffee in my *** had been sitting there
For weeks now collecting poison.
It had been a month
And I too, had collected poison
In the form of underage drinking
Tiny piercing viruses, bottle after bottle
In attempted to eradicate brain cells that held a picture of you
On their nucleus.
It didn’t work.
So I tried inhaling glass in to my lungs
Tried passing out so I could land in a coma
But I missed two feet to much to the right
And landed on my frontal lobe
Where you proceeded to dissect me with your tongue.
So when you texted me this morning
Memories came like cancer
I remembered that car dealership
Where you bought the 1960 sky blue Volkswagen bug
With rust on the side,
I remember driving to North Carolina with you
On a Monday morning.
Blistering cold at twilight
And all we did was whisper and hum
To each other
As we drove on empty interstate highways
You taught me how to cross state lines
And eat food so volatile that radioactivity
Spewed from my taste buds,
Down my throat
And in to my rigid spine
Where it shivered like arthritis.
My body isn’t hollow; it’s just frozen
Because tiny tundras fill the fissures in my rotting skin
My bones are brittle ice cubes bulging out from underneath the surface
And if people were snow, I would be a particle on a flake
And you would be Antarctica: vast, mysterious, uncharted, vicious, brutal, untamed,
And you would have had frozen me in to an arctic sculpture
To be hung over your brick stone fireplace
As you stood there watching me melt
With your blue corpse eyes.
It’s 8:34 now,
I’ve stood here for thirty minutes remembering what you once were
A continental mystery on my western cerebral hemisphere.
There was America,
Specifically Georgia
But you spoke Alaskan.
Talked about going there like 18 year olds talked about Europe
Everyone wants an adventure
But all you wanted was to know how it felt like
To have mountains under your palms
And snow peaks over your head.
They called it climbing.
I called it searching.
But those who climb would inevitably know how to fly
If they knew how to let go
So let go darling.
Stop calling me in December to tell me all the great things we did back in August.
If I’d had written down our phones calls
It would be enough to fill a notebook full of parentheses
Because all we did was whisper and say things we didn’t mean.
So don’t come back and try to freeze me again.
I won’t melt this time, I’ll disintegrate.
I’ll fuse with my fissures
Become tundra and dissolve in to the soil
Where your body is, buried
Beneath layers of cement,
Dirt
And ash.
I place flowers on your head stone every week
But you still keep texting me and texting me
Telling me how great our trip was to North Carolina
And how we can do it all over it again
The whispering, the humming, the parentheses
All I had to do was drink the coffee