I have to move up north,
and forget your name.
I don’t know where my hands are,
what my lips want.
I’ll strip myself raw
with the hum of alcohol,
leave myself
sanitized of you.
I have to.

I came to you as a pilgrim,
palms turned upward,
eyes empty.

You are a beautiful enigma,
a bonified butcher knife
taking aim at my cynic's perspective.

Your hands drum
to beats my heart misses.
My lungs forget
the in and out, in and out
we've been perfecting.

You bring me closer to divinity
than I have ever come before.
I can see you now, eyes ignited
to match my joint.

It was mid-february when I asked
to put a cigarette out on your neck.
In July, I stopped asking,
and started doing.

A fiend waiting for a fix,
I took hit after hit until I inhaled
every last bit of you,
careful not to miss a breath.

It is mid-February again
as I sort out the rainbow pills
into kaleidescope patterns
on my bathroom floor; carefully counting
the ways I loved you.

You tread around me
like a crack in the sidewalk,
counting my vertebrae for fractures
after each time you toe the line.

I've learned to keep
an epi-pen on hand in case
you slip up and feed me the truth.

You can never be too careful.

You are an eight-bit heart attack,
a box of dynamite in the basement
of a match factory.

You don't explode me,
you implode me, I struggle
to keep it all in;

to stay together.

Call it crazy, unreasonable,
sadistic, but this is too deliberate.
Call me a Kennedy, baby.
I die for you.

She has a sadness, and swing
and something else--
like her voice could bring you back from the dead.
She never had a chance, born sick
of the flat Earth she was lain upon.
arms dusted with a film
scrubbed until she was raw,
sins bleeding out in the yellowing shower.

I could die
of smoke inhalation
in a trailer park in Southern Alabama,
my hair streaked with lemon juice
and you wouldn't miss a breath.

My vocal chords throb from chanting
your name to St. Anthony.

I am a 17th century puritan,
nothing without you.

My man.
My grudge.
My emptiness.