This is the most emotionally present
that I've been in a long time.
And now that roll has been called,
I'd like to go ahead and strike my name off of the roster.

It's way too soon
to write you a love poem,
but I think I may be in the socially acceptable time frame
to write you a like poem.

Yesterday, my doctor told me to cut cheese out of my diet,
so I'll try to keep the sentiment as vegan as possible.

Why doesn't my boyfriend want to hold my hand anymore?
It's always been clammy and frigid,
though I suppose it has gained this new
rigidness.

And no one wants to feel responsible
for a dead weight abandoned
in the palm of his hand.

And because it's my lifeless hand,
severed with all the fixings,
rabid and unruly,
nipping at the palm that smothered the life out of it,

Because of this,

he can't even pass it off
as a gag paperweight for Bill at the office.

My hollow regret fluttered to the ground,
bound by gravity
to fall as swiftly and ignorantly as my gaze.

When I fell back into the cramped nook of your shelf,
you didn't even acknowledge me amidst the other knickers and gnats vying for your attention.
You overlooked the viscous hatred glazing my bronze porcelain.

And after you spit-shined me in an attempt to erase the set-in stain
that so starkly contrasted all of the work that you had put into the cocoa complexion nurtured in the heated vacuum of your built-in incubator,
you showed me off to your friends,

your little nesting doll that had shrunk down to its true form,
so cute and abridged that you could fit its summation in your pocket,
doomed to eternally room with your dusty love shields and dingy photocopies of past mistakes.

You're the silent promise held
in fingertips lazily murmuring to my naked skin
while they cross theselves behind my back.