You said you dreamed about her eyes last night,
And what you called The Unreachable Light,
And you wept with a bitterness that cracked your lips with salt.

Your voice breaks with vain repetitions,
as you wring your wrists in mournful frustration;
An impatient aching, the veins in your face a silent screaming proclamation;
I am a man at fault.
This is all my fault.

Your mind, riddled with sharp stalactites of cold indignation,
Condescending every other second with rhythmic dripping condensation,
And the sound it makes keeps you awake with miserable reminders of resounding blame-

Drip-
(Stop.)
Drip-
(I have been dead so long.)

You cut your teeth on infidelity,
and you raged against the Lord,
“There is no sun!
There is no meaning!”
And you put out your eyes so you’d never see that you were wrong.

Oh to hate how great a debtor,
How small is your belief!
You said the end was without absolution,
But I think you know it isn’t true.

Drip-
(Stop.)

This is not a beautiful story.
This is about you and me.
This is about two common thieves who could never see the forest for the trees,
and every word we breathed to one another in the spaces in between,
choosing to believe that we were anything but sinking vessels,
rending holes in the other’s heart-
this is about you and me in the dark,
sinking to the bottom of the sea.

See, this is not a beautiful story.

But the narrative you crafted was of two lovers in a romance, and you said that it was best that we keep it in the darkness, under the ironic promise that it was in the name of honesty to be fostered between us-
I suppose I wanted to believe it.

I was yours, and you were my secret.

But no heart ever knew a secret that didn’t grieve it, and it grieves me to think of unveiling my beauty meant for another man beneath the wandering of your hands,
and you said you didn’t understand why there were tears in my eyes.

Well neither did I,
but it still keeps me awake at night.

And I didn’t know it, but every time we parted you went home to finish what we started

alone in the dark with your computer screen.

This is not a beautiful story.

You used to say that we were more than the chemicals responding in our bodies,
like what we had was more than lonesome, broken misery masquerading as intimacy,

but it wasn’t.

You just needed a warm body
and I needed to be enough for somebody
we could never alleviate the pain we were trying to escape,
and If I could see you today, I would tell you that I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

Wind berates the window panes in angry exclamations
And the walls groan with the intermittent vibrations of my father’s steady blows-
With every other heavy step the leaden strokes of his fury, a loaded roque mallet meets the wall, meant for me.
And deep in my body, white terror (boiler heat)
climbs the stairs in syncopated heart beats.

Daddy, can you hear me in there?

But I think he’s gone,
and I’m running.

Long hallways, deep black, and the crack of his weapon send shrill fear in (fire hose) snakes down my back.

“COME ON OUT, WORTHLESS PUP, AND TAKE YOUR MEDICINE,
BAD LITTLE BOYS HAVE TO TAKE THEIR CORRECTION,”

I think daddy is gone,
This inhuman place took him.

In the back of my mind,
(You’ve got to keep your love alive),
In the back of my mind,
(I know that you tried.)

There always comes the end of the line, and as I beat daddy to the attic by a step, I know I’ve reached mine.
There is nowhere to go.
There is nowhere to hide.

“If my daddy is in there, he knows that you lied!
You’re just a false face, just a big hungry void,
and you swallow men like him to survive.
If my daddy is in there– ”

And all at once, his countenance changed.
A man hollowed by agonized sorrow, he bled,
(Monsters are real)
“Doc, run away quick-”
(And ghosts are too)
“But remember this-”
(They live inside of us)
“Remember I love you.”
(And sometimes they win.)

And I believe him.
I kiss his blood stained fingers,
And vignettes of sweet memories pass between us, fading with the hue of humanity in his eyes-

And I cannot say goodbye.

The mallet ascends to end him-
A coup de grace, a bleak salvation,
So that I can look upon the mangled maw of the awful stronghold that held him.

“Masks off, then,”
It says.

And I grin.

Your life, like white light, still ringing in brilliant clarity,
In bitter delicious memory in our minds.
-your beautiful life,
Standing out in burning silhouettes every time we close our eyes.

I write poems about you in my dreams.
I try to work it out in miserable half-sleep,
How a girl of thirteen could one day be wrapped in the arms of her parents,
and the next,
Immured in cold earth without mercy.

You cannot be gone.
You are so **** young.

You never met a heart you didn’t mark with the splendor of your beauty,
That outrageous, unique, chromatic personality,
Resplendent by nature,
Demure in humility.

Do you hear me where you are?
Sitting in glory at the feet of God?

Your parents will see you when they come Home.

I know that we’ll see you when we all come Home.

He drew a figure eight on my spine, absentmindedly,
and traced the nape of my neck with his fingertip when he said,
“You are beautiful to me.”

But the ellipsis in the silence spoke louder than he did, and the look in his eye was not born because I was lovely;
It was not because he loved me.

A thing too small for love-
But far too large to be lust;

Simple. Ugly.

He looked at me like he was hungry.

So sweetly he critiqued each curve, every line, blurring my edges with the images of every bent perception pulled from the mire of his mind;

and I
could not
satisfy


Pretty innocence diminished in the grip of his vice,
Pressed tight against my body, despised in dark eyes.
I am not the inhuman creatures you contrived in the middle of the night.
I am not the feminine expression of your ******* pride.

What a wicked crime,
to take a woman’s body and leave the woman behind.

You and I,
buried beneath the coruscated winter sky
In taciturn stillness,
half-enraptured by the unmasked glory,
and half by the unasked in the others eyes.

There is no time to hold us;

There is no other moment.

Volatile, visible breaths,
The almost- touch of our fingertips,
and the quiet intimacy of our insignificance against the endless, open sky.

You,
My darling,
and I.

Between you and me,
I see it;
Ink black, can't-take-it-back,
-Indecent.
Words you'll later swear you didn't mean,
But I'll feel them,
Sinking deeply,
Steeply,
Creeping in between each of the promises you made to me,
Infinitesimally small,
Like the space between me and the wall you broke your fingers on.

I am not the idealistic dream you fell in love with me to be,
And I am not breaking your heart by breaking the frame you pushed mine into.

I am a living, breathing, incandescent human being

-and I need you.