astonishingly
nervous
for lips tasting
of cheap wine

do i scare you?

you touch me like
the slightest misstep, could
break me

is this
tenderness, or
fear?

try to
rearrange the stars
like the furniture
in the room
that used to be

ours

was your touch as sacred
as i made it
seem
or just the pieces
of a teenage dream

remember that when
your wavering soul
catches fire
for the second
or hundredth
time

when you call on me
once more
misery boiling over
a cascade of every
decision, you
never made

i will not be there
you are alone

she was god
the devil
she, religion

every time
we made love
i’d repent my sins
and hail mary
she’d kiss my arms
memories of her
left as bruises

my hand writing isn’t flowing
curving cursive
like a finger teasing down your spine
it’s rough
like the goosebumps
i wish i gave you
i want to decipher the brail on your arms
but i am not bold enough to touch you

you didn’t think
the lesions of my
soul
were ****

you just had
to see me
as i am

harsh precision
my soul as a prism
for me alone

embarrassing to say
you were the first
not to get hard
when i took my lithium

the right thing
at wrong time
how cliché

you,
platonic *******
entangled in your own
heartstrings
you wear your melancholy
like a willful
straitjacket

temper unreliable
as the midwest weather
nights spent talking to the trees certain
as the dirt on your father’s grave
and god is his dampened smile
when he tells you he doesn’t trim his eyebrows anymore
because you told him you liked them wild
how many enigmas can dance on the
end of your cigarette
before sunrise

hope for an accident
hope for injury
not so that you
feel something
a stale trope
you already feel too much
no
hope for
marginal catastrophe
hope for
the ability to point
to that one thing
external
and say that is why