Rain came down in buckets the night you decided you wanted a change.
That night my heart felt colder than the droplets hitting the ground
because the fact of the matter was that you and I had a real relationship.
No,
not the kind where I wanted to kiss your skin, but the type where
I wanted to ravish your bones-- to pick them clean after someone else
had already eaten the meaty chunks.
I wanted to tear off the ****** bits of soul clinging on to the bone,
because that's all you ever did, was hang on.
You said you loved change but all you did was collect it in an old jar
and time to you was nothing to be considered as though it didn't matter
and to me, you started to turn into the watch I wore on my left wrist
that never showed the right time because it didn't ever move,
but people thought it did because its a clock
and that is what clocks do.
The clock was as lifeless as the grandmother that wore it before I,
the grandmother that sat
with her husband on sunny afternoons while he puffed on an Italian pipe.
A pipe I still hold in my possession as if it were the hands of a child that
clung to me for safety.
After years of burning it was so frail and old that the inside had started to
crumble, just like you.
I remember the day when you went and
burned all of your paintings
in a big bonfire and watched as the flames licked the thick paint.
You thought you could burn away your past and outrun it
like the wind thinks it can outrun the ocean.
(They go at the same pace.)
You also thought you could burn me away
when one night you said I was like those **** paintings,
and you wanted me to burn.
But,
here's the thing you forgot about people--
they aren't possessions and they can fight back.
I can understand the high you get from the surge of power in
grinding someone to dust.
But, in all of your bare-footed glory
you chose the wrong person to step on, because
every time you tried to burn me I would burn right back like
sand on a hot summer day.
With every step you took you were hurting yourself, not me,
and I wanted to feel bad but I just couldn't knowing that
you were walking on the coast you so desperately loved.
The coats that when you went to visit for your sister's graduation you called
home
as if home was a place.
In that place you called home they were smoking joints and
giving each other tattoos in their basements, no different than here.
And I knew you wanted that life so bad,
but as soon as you had it you'd want to come back
and you didn't want to admit that I knew the truth.
So, I never brought it up because you always got mad and real
quiet like the trees before a storm.
Soon though, I was going to snap like those trees in the storm that was you
and I started to feel like a real ***.
I was a mule loaded down with your secrets and none and
the two evils weighed on my back and heart so heavily that
I started to feel sick.
One night while talking to you I started to feel so ill that in a scream
I vomited up the word
"****."
Nothing followed.
No "this" nor "that" nor
"you."
I decided that if you wanted to fill in the blanks you could.
Your words always had a way off filling up spaces because
everything you said had an impact.
It was if your words were meteors hand-picked by the gods to be
thrown down to Earth.
Lately though, your words were knives that got stuck in your throat and
after you finally spit them up you were dying
and my face was covered in your blood.
That's all it was anymore, blood that tasted only slightly better than the
matchsticks you were putting between my teeth to engulf me in flames.
I spit them out like tooth picks,
all a part of our little war.
I couldn't shake the taste your fingers left in my mouth.
You had become toxic,
and your fingers were covered with gritty residue from smoking a joint
and sticky from bringing only pleasure to yourself.
I wanted to break your fingers like promises.
Maybe if I shut your hands in a car door just like you shut me out,
they would bleed into a poem that would finally satisfy you,
until you decided that it too, must
burn
like all the other broken, imperfect pains of this world.
Like me,
who you had left all
alone.
A Slam Poem