the cosmic balance of all life
    is perhaps beyond my perception
  but still may hold the key
         to why love and hate are so **** close
and why i never win at bingo.

your music is too loud

but i'm not too old.

i always pretend i don't see the tears welling in your sad eyes
when we have painful discussions
about the people we love most and how they hate themselves and the world around them

but i do.

lets make pancakes

and watch cartoons

and have a superficial understanding of one another while we are temporarily intoxicated with infatuation and never speak to each other again after this summer's brief romance.

Saturday night I dreamed.
I was roaming in my Nana's house
My fingers tracing the walls filled with
Hundred of photographs, each in a
                    (yo)u-
                   nique
                    frame.
I stopped at one of my mother
Standing at a beach.
Skeletal; she was gone. Skin drawn tight over ribs, tibiae, humeri.

I remembered Sunday morning when I washed out my cereal bowl in the sink.

Mom-
     if you only knew
            how close i have come
                    to letting the acidic, undigested
                            river flow from my throat
                        into a porcelain chamber
              maybe you would think
        before you squeeze
my soft belly again