They called us names on the playground.

We were small. Cherubim-faced terrors with bruised knees and perpetually greasy hair.

We dreamed of our lives after college. After our first cars. Our first houses. Our first jobs. Imaginary model wives and spoiled children. The All-American Daydream.

We didn't know what college was. We could barely see over the dashboard on Auntie's old Cadillac.

We grew up.

You became a man. Good-looking, strong, covered in tattoos. Scars on your chest and scars in your head because they called us names on the playground and those curses stuck with you.

Through every needle, every pill and every doctor's visit.

It was worth the pain, you said.

You'd do it all again, you said.

Live through the taunts. Live through the nights spent screaming up at the sky and asking God why He made you that way. Why He didn't make you a he and gave you ******* and hips instead.

They called you names on the playground. They called you something that you never were and never wanted to be.

Now we've outgrown the passing fancies of shiny trucks and four-bedroom houses in quiet suburbia.

Given up a life of apple pie to live between paychecks in a ****** Brooklyn apartment.

You're happy, now.

Happier than you ever were when they called you girl as if that were an insult.

As if they didn't understand the contempt they parroted; spat, hate.

They called you a name.

Then you changed it.

Became it.

Then your name set you free.

There never was a face as fair as yours,
A heart as true, a love as pure and keen.
These things endure, if anything endures.
But, in this jungle, what high heaven immures
Us in its silence, the supreme serene
Crowning the dagoba, what destined die
Rings on the table, what resistless dart
Strike me I love you; can you satisfy
The hunger of my heart!

Nay; not in love, or faith, or hope is hidden
The drug that heals my life; I know too well
How all things lawful, and all things forbidden
Alike disclose no pearl upon the midden,
Offer no key to unlock the gate of Hell.
There is no escape from the eternal round,
No hope in love, or victory, or art.
There is no plumb-line long enough to sound
The abysses of my heart!


There no dawn breaks; no sunlight penetrates
Its blackness; no moon shines, nor any star.
For its own horror of itself creates
Malignant fate from all benignant fates,
Of its own spite drives its own angel afar.
Nay; this is the great import of the curse
That the whole world is sick, and not a part.
Conterminous with its own universe
the horror of my heart!

****** isn’t a love song.

It isn’t the warmth of your lover’s lips,
or their hands skimming across your naked skin.

People are not ******.

Drugs are not a metaphor for your personal Adonis.

It isn’t beautiful.

It isn’t romantic.

It sure as hell ain’t heaven (but it really ******* feels like it).

Sometimes you imagine them.

Their body pressed against yours. Heated kisses and veins like cracks through marble—

Soft enough to carve with your aching fingertips.

People. Are not. ******.

You want someone whose presence can be melted down and injected.

People falter, break, lie, abuse, cheat, steal
and
leave.

Oh, God knows you have (every God you never even knew you prayed to).

You feel too much and then too little.

Not everything is as simple as fixing a rig but everything is as complicated as searching through your skin, trying again and again and AGAIN to find a perfect place to let that melted bliss baptize you for the

first;
fiftieth
hundredth
time.

Love is not a drug.

Addiction is not a religion.

Someone’s absence is not withdrawal.

Death is not poetry.

****** isn’t a ******* love song.