i watched your warning apparition
consume your earthen eyes.

your warning apparition,
your exposed shadow,
the slowness of your breath.

this spirit inside your chest,
ever expanding,
constricting the blood in your lungs.

pale, skinny face.
you could never get enough sleep,
left your clothes on the floor.

can you breathe now that you’ve left?

has the fog trapped in your ribs dissapated?

has my absence made it easier to fill your lungs with love for someone else?

you told me that you wanted to save me from the emminent warning apparition.
you said it would make you mean.
make you silent.
make me hate every cloud you’d ever seen
because it gave you the wrong idea.

i may have acted impulsively
in dragging my knees through the gravel,
but it was only because
i thought you would see my kneecaps,
scarred and bleeding,
and lift me from the ground.

i can’t walk down congress street.
i see the warning apparition
sitting on the bench where i sat,
watching you sprint to me,
arms spread because you got out of work.

i see it laying in my bed.
the left side.
wishing that just once it would haunt my dreams,
so i could truly feel your sleeping embrace one last time.

i can’t take a shower.
i’m washing your face.
i can’t go to work.
you aren’t home to come back to.

your warning apparition
is not your fault.

nobody asks to be haunted.
not by a truly vengeful ghost.

She is sunsets and Her laugh is waves
crashing on the beaches you bake your skin on
you layer the sunscreen and tell yourself that She is worth the sunburn.

Her eyes are embers and they smolder, smolder, smolder
there is a hole in your jugular that She has burned right through
She is beauty (roses, blankets, eating food with Her hands),
She is light (candles, thumb­lit match sticks, teeth: carved marble).

She is love.
you can feel Her in your chest
and Her temple worships
that God is a gender-neutral term.
you water the apple tree in her chest,
blooming,
but fruitless.

this time,
only adam
feasting
from her tree of temptation.