Disappointment is the taste of your tongue lingering
on the curve of my lips.
It is the taste of black coffee gone stale at ten fifteen in the morning after you're gone.
The pain I feel is that of the ember side of your cigarette pressed deeply
into the palm of my left hand as the only thing you'd ever truly given me.

The defeat I hear is hidden in your voice during the call I received from you late last night
amongst the terrified willingness to try and pick up the phone in the first place.
It's the type of disappointment you understand on the opposite end of the line.
It's the disappointment you smell on his lips when you're not even with him.

And I hate that I want to taste again the malt liquor on your tongue,
that I want to feel your fingertips dancing across fresh wounds.
That I want to feel the fear and anxiety by plummeting into your arms in the middle of the night until I realize you're not there.
It is the type of disappointment I feel in myself for ever having tried to pursue something as wild and as captivating as you.

By happenstance,
I wonder which part of me were to break if I ever heard your voice again.
But nevertheless I sit and wait considerably
for thoughts of me to pass,
or to register through your head again.
Either way, it doesn't really matter because you ****** me harder and faster beyond my ability
to recover.
I never read the terms and conditions before I fell in love with you,
now I'm beginning to
wish that I had.

Waiting for you was like waiting for my mother to stop smoking,
but you know that when you drop an old habit
you tend to pick up a new one

She never told me about the filters she left behind my pillow case,
or the empty bottles of wine hidden behind the children's books.

And when you walked into the restroom you could see the walls tainted in varying shades of yellows.

She taught me about addiction in a subtle way.
By age seven I learned to enjoy the smell,
and by age eight I learned what it felt like to be drunk from neglect.

I was hoping you'd understand,
but a while back I took your worn out edges and folded them back and forth so I could tear you apart easier.

I regret it now because all I have been doing is trying to put your pieces back together.
You never came back together.
Yesterday I was playing pretend with your shadow.
I was pretending that I never gave up praying for you.

The truth however is that I did
and maybe a part of that was because I never truly had faith in anything.
I was just hoping you'd stay a little longer.

Sometimes I'm convinced that I'll hear you say my name,
but it's really me trying to remember the way you sounded in the recorded messages left on the machine.
Back then I could've never expressed the discontent I felt.

Let's pretend that if you read these poems that maybe things would've been different.