He wishes he had a hobby.

Wishes he had a hand to hold,
wishes the intake of breathes was
filled with a special kind of
something.

Special something? He can't even name
it, yet he wishes.

Names little things to himself, knows them with
a distinctness that he won’t admit. For
what reason, we will never know.

He hopscotches around the details.
No one mentions this either.

Walking through the house
while no ones around,
speaking loudly to himself.

He's trying to fill up the long, quiet years.

Trying to fill up his quiet heart.
Maybe there is something he's missing.

Oh, he's missing a lot of things.

There's a list, somewhere.
Someone bets this.

It's him.

It's his brain.

It's his memories, the way they echo in his
head after repeatedly going over them
like lines for a play.*

Sometimes he acts out the parts.

He was standing at
  the front door,
  but watching the cat
sitting on the rocking chair.
It was black and white
  and looking out onto
  the green grass, or above
the apartment complex,
or beyond it, at the place
  his mother was, somewhere.
  He didn't have to jiggle its handle
to see if the door was locked,
to know if you weren't home.
  But he had locked you out of his heart
  for so long by then, that
hating you for locking the front door
would have been ludicrous.
  He was just tired,
  not only from a long day at school,
but also from asking the
neighbors for a bite to eat.
  The cat flicked its tail in
  drowsy agreement. It never
came in, but he never tried
to make it come in anyways.
  By then it was too late
  to care about cats
in rocking chairs.

There's a disconnection,
   because he doesn't know
where the line crosses
from crucification
   to melodrama.
The light plays
   on his face,
mysterious, illuminating,
  and all that,
but you pay attention
  to his wrists,
nailed to the slab
of wood in such a
   way as to incite
divine intervention.
  Cue the angelic choir.
Their voices are not rejoicing,
    though, but divinely wrathful
towards our imitating.

Instead, I give you

simple tragedies;

how you will
never remember everything
and the more you live the
more there is forgotten.
Sewn optical cords
seeing the reimagined
through blurry suspicion,
stifling doubt, and
****** buttons.

Metallic words
cutting skin like butter.
The knives will sink
slowly into our
chests and we will be
exactly too far away
from anyone to
do anything about it.

How convenient.

A set of hands,
their cross-stitched fingers
frayed at the ends,
entangling. Still,
they will stumble
to pick up the pieces,
to fix the seaming
in the strings.