I expected pain. More memorable than a dull discomfort in the chest. I knew that I would have to purge you, and I expected some fever dreams. I had one about my ashes being carried to you through the air.
Eyes open, aware of the demise I constructed. There was a toughness, a crispness around the edges of my love.

But I didn't know that you could lacerate lifespans into a fraction. My suffering was emancipated and given the greater field to run through. I didn't know that my lust would drive me to lunacy. I didn't know that you would become a vice. I was promised the comfort of satiation, I didn't know that I would become primal for it. I didn't know that I would search for you in the bottom of every bottle, every swirl of wine that I smell.

I didn't know that the tick of midnight would hit differently. The spaces that you didn't occupy torment me more than the ones that held your presence. I expected you to reshape my inner aspects, and give me the most excruciating *******. I didn't know that you would close your fingers around my waist and inject poison into the hot pink. Not once did I imagine any children of yours that I would volunteer to exorcise over and over.

A mental, chemical stripping of the facade, I anticipated. But there was still physiological agony when you released my airway. When my body would catch the breaths that I tried to reject. I didn't know that you would hold me up to the Sun to show me that it's not God after all. I expected pain. But not a pain that would determine my price.

I've given my insecurities a grave.

Hands tied, gagged by the ball of fear you shoved into my mouth. You dragged me to the center of the room and pulled me up by my ribcage. Lips, puffy and quivering from crying.
The pain began to push through the narcotized haze I was in.
Before I started counting my regrets, before I let my mind expatiate the possibilities of my death
All I could think about, the only question I wanted to ask was,
“Were you scared when you lied to me?"
When I did, you threatened to take my tongue out.

At one point I became airborne
I flew into a thunderstorm
because it reminded me of your heartbeat
There were swords and liquids, but not you
Not the you that I held so close
Carbon dioxide fighting to escape my body but it had no where to go
Depression is a jealous God

I was writing for what felt like years with such vigor that the color bled from my eyes
Mountains of texts in every language surrounded me. An island of action, my singular goal was unknown even to myself. But oxygen was inferior, I snapped synapses and tore out parts of my nervous system. I was a writer, **** everything else.

I love you more from a far. I love you more in theory.

If you ask me, he lit the match that set the Moon on fire
It’s not a myth; I was there, when I had no home
And I walked in Saturn’s ring rain for so long it sloughed off my skin
I marched, trying to flatten the crater I’d made
Because I was ashamed of it
I was the last meteor to hit his heart; the loudest
But that was so long ago
The quietest revolutions are usually the most violent
If you ask him, I smelled like Genesis and Revelation from the inside
******* insatiable
I slathered honey on my cheeks and boiled my blood
so hot until my arteries turned charred black
I licked my wounds from the impact and discovered just what the hell was poisoning me

If you ask me, I didn’t know him last night and I won’t know him on the last night
But my God, he inspires me

I used to wake up missing him, as if we didn’t spend almost every waking minute in each other’s presence. As if I didn’t hear his voice more than my own.
“Your shadow doesn’t belong to you. I know where you’ve been.”
“I have no reason to lie,” he would recite to me.
That was our nightly tradition.
I would watch him sit across from me at the dinner table,
telling me that he never did mean to hurt me, with my heart on his plate.
I packed ahead of time, and reorganized my regrets to make room for our relationship.
I crumpled up the letter I wrote and put it in my back pocket.
I couldn’t bring myself to explain why I had to leave him; my absence would be devastating enough.

He would make his fabrications fit into the palm of his hand and smack me with them.
I was born and raised by the backhand of heartbreak so it was home away from home when I ran away to him.
Instead of standing up for myself
I wrote poetry so hot that I would burn his mouth every time I tried to feed him.
He was a better cook anyway.

My grandmother, when I sought her wise council,
told me that I should accept the pain and try to make something out of it.

I remember when I tried to make love out of my pain for the last time.
He clawed my spirit out of me, put it under my head like a pillow.
He laid on top of me, grinding into my pelvic bone, making heat that burned my skin.
The bite marks on my chest stung when his sweat dripped on me.
I closed my eyes and saw the manifestation of my fears.
My body finally gave out after running from my ******, and he came when I did.

As he slept, I cleaned the blood from under his fingernails.