This city makes me miss you.
And I would pretend to be surprised,
but the ceilings in cities are always too high
and my thoughts tend to wander.
(For the record, I am less than impressed
that they found their way back to you.)
Last night, I swear you were waiting for me to fall asleep
to climb into the rafters, and sneak into my dreams.
I woke up feeling haunted and exhausted.

Now you've been following me all day,
and I'm tired of looking over my shoulder.
Kissing him makes me remember the taste of your bitter coffee breath.
His kind eyes contrast the complex hurt yours used to reflect.
His simple, level-headed ways make me recall all
of the circles our troubled words used to spin,
the endless loops we were always trapped within.

My ears keep echoing with the way
you used to chatter nervously in your sleep.
And I can almost still smell your apartment
with the candles struggling to mask damp laundry,
unwashed dishes, the smell of sweat and stale ****.
The heaviness collecting inside of my chest resembles
the weight of your body wrapped around my lap
the last time we spoke and the way my fingers
still found their way to your back.
I wonder if you understood the things my fingertips traced
while our words started cornering us into our familiar place.

                                                      We were circling the drain anyway,
I was just another silly girl who thought she could save someone.

                                 I'm really sorry
                                You should be
I miss you
Good.
                                                         ­                  
                                              ­                                    You always saw through my *******,
                                                       ­                             it scared the hell out of me.
                    
I would have loved you exactly the way you are-unconditionally  
                                           ­                      You were always enough.

                                                       ­                                                                 ­   I love being miserable.
                                                    ­                                            Well, you should probably get used to it.

                                                        
                                                      We were circling the drain anyway...

Our conversations are the world's worst song on repeat
but I felt such smug closure after that night
things finally felt finished or at least mostly complete.
So why now did you feel the need to start the haunting again?
Call off your ******* ghost, B.
I am tired. Its over this time.
This needs to finally end.

Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
I have lived o'er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

I have whirled with the earth at the dawning,
When the sky was a vaporous flame;
I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.

I had drifted o'er seas without ending,
Under sinister grey-clouded skies,
That the many-forked lightning is rending,
That resound with hysterical cries;
With the moans of invisible daemons, that out of the green waters rise.

I have plunged like a deer through the arches
Of the hoary primoridal grove,
Where the oaks feel the presence that marches,
And stalks on where no spirit dares rove,
And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers through dead branches above.

I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains
That rise barren and bleak from the plain,
I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains
That ooze down to the marsh and the main;
And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things, I care not to gaze on again.

I have scanned the vast ivy-clad palace,
I have trod its untenanted hall,
Where the moon rising up from the valleys
Shows the tapestried things on the wall;
Strange figures discordantly woven, that I cannot endure to recall.

I have peered from the casements in wonder
At the mouldering meadows around,
At the many-roofed village laid under
The curse of a grave-girdled ground;
And from rows of white urn-carven marble, I listen intently for sound.

I have haunted the tombs of the ages,
I have flown on the pinions of fear,
Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages;
Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:
And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.

I was old when the pharaohs first mounted
The jewel-decked throne by the Nile;
I was old in those epochs uncounted
When I, and I only, was vile;
And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.

Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,
And great is the reach of its doom;
Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,
Nor can respite be found in the tomb:
Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.

Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
I have lived o'er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

when i'm gone, will there be
a space that's just the size of me
that goes for walks, from time to time
and in its head makes little rhymes
that recall somewhat wistfully
a time when it was filled with me?

I can turn invisible.
I do it all the time.
You may not even notice that I’ve changed- just that one minute I'm here and then suddenly I'm gone.

It has a price.

I can turn invisible and the world gets vastly larger.
I shrink inside myself until all that’s left are atoms smaller than you can see.
Impalpable.
Insensible.
Compacted super-dense matter.
Dark and malnourished, I cannibalize .
I eat the pieces of me that are brightest and leaden with memory each time becoming smaller but denser;
heavier with the weight of myself but faded.
Stunted.
Fragile.
Small.

I can turn invisible and you wouldn't even notice
because I've been here all this time just lingering and shrinking.

The world keeps getting larger and I keep getting smaller.

It’s a feeling like butterflies.
It’s a feeling like mourning.
It’s a feeling like no other I can describe to you coming from one such as I.
Invisible.

The world gets larger.
I still get smaller.

My tears are hot and tiny. Puny things full of anger and loathing and loneliness.
I consume them.
They make me smaller.
Super-dense matter burning within these half digested bits. It's a feeling like no other.
I've reached the apex.
I've reached the abyss.

I can turn invisible.
I've been doing it all this time
and the world has gotten too big for me and I am too heavy with the world for it.
Compacted.
Super-dense.
It feels like butterflies and mourning and the pieces of me that burn.
It's hot inside my shrunken belly,
too small for you to see,
all the while I grow too fat on my tears and too full on this emptiness.

I may explode with this smallness;
this denseness;
and all that you couldn’t see will come spewing from me and the world will stop getting bigger
and I will birth a new me.

I'm a Super Nova.
I was invisible
but the weight was too great.
Compacted super-dense matter.

You couldn’t even see me.

But now you can.

Please invent a tool
to measure the volume of
what the heart can hold.