I stare outward
With formaldehyde kisses
Caressing my arms.
I look at the knotholes in the train tracks
Because that is the last place I saw your hand
Before it went under.
I absolve myself with work,
My hands too tired to hold you
At the end of the night,
My eyes blind to your suffering
With every drop of *****.
I will swear to the day I die
That I am the ****** time has ******
Time and time again.

Our eyes met
And you scurried away.

You may have been a roach in my life
But I will always regret turning on the light.

I think one day it might be nice to call you and tell you that I'm sorry. I just bought a house with this guy I love very much and I've been very busy but he works different hours than me so I've also had a lot of time to think. I think pretty often about how in love we were and how it could be said that I went ahead and ****** everything up. That's okay though. Because you loved hanging on your mothers coat tails at 30 more than you loved me and the guy before you loved *** more than me and the guy before him loved men more than me and the guy before that loved liquor more than me and the guy before him loved drugs more than me and the guy before that loved himself more than me.

I see now that no matter how much you give it will never be enough.

Though I still refuse to stop giving.

I'm sorry.

Maybe someday you'll put on your own coat instead of hanging onto your moms sleeve.

I hope whoever you love next is more complacent than I was.

I never liked to see the wheels stop spinning and we were always stuck in traffic.

But maybe that was just me.

I don't know. I just wanted to tell you that I'm doing fine and I'm happy.

I hope you get better.

I get easily annoyed,
Being the only sober person along
On this tirade
Of ******* kisses
And malformed care.
I spend my time easily convincing myself
That the only way I will believe he loves me
Is if he splits his bleeding heart
Over my chalice
When they display my body to him
At the morgue,
Toe tag so lifeless against my sole.
I think of my body not as a temple
But a bear trap,
Sprung or in the process of springing,
His ankle twisted in it's teeth.
We walked into this together
Knowing each others baggage
But suspecting there to be hidden compartments.
With ease
I compartmentalize my anguish
And move one,
My emotions just a simplicity
Too enticing in their entirety
To be dealt with accordingly.
I have brought myself to believe that he loves me
But only in his frontal lobe,
My life and personality
Being at the root of who he is today.
I say ******* kisses because he is addicting
But I say ******* kisses because
He is deadly.

It's been one of those days
Where I hope that you still stalk what I've written
So you may potentially see
That I'm starving for salvation.

At nineteen years old
I had to ask my coworker
What it meant to have someone
Stand at your wedding.
I have seen more overdoses,
More suicides,
More accidental shootings
Than I have seen lives created;
Lives joined.
I do not know what it means
To stand at someone's wedding
But I do know what it means to be a pallbearer
Because I remember the tears
In my father's eyes
When he laid his father to rest
Due to medicinal negligence.
I do not know
What exactly happens at a wedding
But I can tell you
What happens
When they find your best friend since kindergarten
Cold
In a hotel room miles away
With a needle in her arm,
I can tell you that we all hugged her mother
And smoked cigarettes
And wished that we could be spelling it
Heroine instead of
******
But the world doesn't work that way
And sometimes,
Most of the time,
When people ask you if you want some coke
They do not mean the soft drink
But sometimes the people I love
Accept it any way.

I wish I could tell you
That I have fallen in love
With warmth seeping from my pores and pain
Departing from my body,
But I fell in love
With thumbs pressed into my eye sockets
And a noose around my neck.

I wish I could say these things
Without implying that I fell in love
With an obligation
But there are only so many defensive words
When your walls have fallen so far.