Good riddance!*

Scream something in the privacy
of your mind and the body
might reject it. Gagging on the
thought, false and fumbling
but raw nonetheless.

I could only think of ugly words
for it, haggard, maybe, wasting, rot,
so I changed my tune to angry.
Sad makes us pale and sick,
but furious is fetching.

Bitter taste on the tongue, don't flatter
yourself. You weren't the one who
taught me, "they'll never say it back."
I had a lifetime of prayer for that.
You didn't make me this way; you
just stepped on the landmine.

Mangled and mine.
Tell death how you like it and
maybe you can get down on all fours,
pretend it was me that did you *****,
pretend it was me with a noose in my hand.

The way it itches inside, the
cacophony of it all, the utter music
of the moment in screeches.
It is anything but romantic.
It is something I broke my arms
to reach.

Just underneath the surface,
something dark and impatient.
It's always been there, sharp and
rubbed the wrong way, cursing and
simmering. Sometimes I think
you know exactly what you're doing.

Falling all over,
drenched in a rain
that has made you shiver
so long you wouldn't recognize
sun if it fell across the pavement
in front of you. But the sun
always leaves shadows anyway,
so you pick your battles.

Stranded in this sea
my mother says is a just a stream.
You never believed in mutiny, only
making decisions that were
"best for everyone."

And how can I argue with that?

The side character, the bent-in
bottle cap, reducing me to a
bad habit. I know. I said I wasn't
going to do this anymore.
I said a lot of things. I'm sorry.

The crux of it,
I think. I'd rather a noose
hold me up than use you
as a crutch. Shaking our heads
at the kicked-up dust, I never
wanted it to be this way.

I don't have any explanations for you.
I'm just crazy.

In my dreams, we are giants
with palms wide enough to hold the earth in,
keeping it still, freezing the human
machinations below and watching them
run about like ants when we let go.

In my dreams, you take the stars
out of my eyes and put them
in your mouth, constellations on
your tongue that I can't make out, and then
we make out, those stars mingling
between us, sizzling and sharp, cutting
the insides of my cheeks like razor blades.

In my dreams, you are hungry
and cruel, so when I wake up to the ruins
of a love that looks more like a suicide
attempt than a refuge, I find myself
wishing you had the decency to hate me.

In my dreams, we're nightmares.
In my dreams, you set everything on fire.
In my dreams, smoke curls down our throats,
and in the morning, you taste like ash.

Words turning stale,
rolling the sour taste around
inside your mouth.
Nausea mixing in your gut, but
how do you explain it to someone,
that what you want doesn't even matter?
Anxiety and depression already
occupy your bed in the worst kind of three-way,
and there isn't any room for someone
who could actually love you.
How do you tell someone that it's like
**** without a safe word, that the only part
they would ever get to play is aftercare,
damage control?
The poison in your mind infecting everything;
it's just better to love from a distance.
There's less blood.

I wonder how many people have ran the stop sign
on the "corner of happy and healthy," or who has held
that feeling of wrong at gunpoint and tried making demands.
These are bottom of the drawer days when you join the heap
in the closet, where your mismatched shoes live, the
background music bleeding from the score.

I said I wouldn't write about suicide anymore.
I wish I would have kept the old poems I wrote
because memory never serves me right, and I'm liable to
make the same mistakes, like when we met at the
atrophy of empathy, the misplaced apostrophe in
a long line of ****** letters. Mama always said, sometimes
you just gotta grit your teeth.

Another moment, another day that stretches into even
more still, and the sensation of bubbling and spilling over,
when the ground feels less like the ground and more
like a tightrope. You thought things would be different,
but they're not. You thought there would be some
order to it all, some rules for being, but here we are, scrambling.
Here we are, feeling for a light switch in a very dark room.

Journal ramblings, everything a corner, the sins that wait
for you outside the confessional booth while you repent.
Hold this for me, you said. I am still holding this for you,
so climb inside the gun cabinet and make yourself comfortable.
You’re going to be here awhile.

The psychologists and psychiatrists go for a drink and talk
about the nutcases while I throw straw wrappers
their way. Maybe they do not know this winter, but I do.
I know the depth of something flat and how it feels to snap
and be snapped. I have built us a city and watched it burn,
turned it inside out, inversion of inertia, speeding toward the
thing that lies underneath the surface, amorphous shapes
and blurs of color you claw at for hours.

I was going to tell God to take a hike but I showed him
to the bus stop instead. Small mercies, I only wanted
a little miracle. Can you blame me? But there are prices to pay,
always prices to pay, even when your credit is ****, so you
drive away instead, past the city, watch the green blobs blotting
the landscape, the creams and beige of the field making
your breath catch, the sun glinting off the wheat. You can barely
see it, but you can see it, and you want to slam on the brakes,
recollect the fleeting scene before it escapes.

This isn't what you wanted.
This isn't what you dreamt for yourself,
but this is what you have.
Scoot closer to me. I want someone to ride this out with.

A quiet recklessness,
undone seat belts and unlocked doors,
how midnight sits in your mind like
the hands of a clock are holding it there.

It's a different music now, a change
in how the dream tastes, the way
everything feels like sandpaper.
You swore you could see
from underneath the dark of your eyelids.
Go back to sleep, I said.

Someone asked me
what faith was. I said it was an act
of surrender. We have faith
in what owns us. You asked me
what faith was, but I couldn't
look you in the eye.

I remember you liked
your socks to hug your toes.
I remember I liked how you looked
when you told me that,
bathed in a beam of refrigerator light
like a helicopter search, the corner
of your mouth twitching upwards
into a lopsided smile.

It begins like this; It ends like this.
God spit us out of his mouth.
God sent a flood to wash us clean.
God made us from dust, and we still haven't
recovered.

You can't drive me out of Eden
without driving yourself out.
You drove us out of Eden, and I
hate you for it. You drove us out of Eden,
and I love you anyway.
Figure that one out.

You don't really know who you are
until you lose it.
Spilled milk, it's sad, you know?
We forget, we do, everything
except this, the way it settles
in your chest, your heart
working overtime to pump through it.

I have regrets, but
you know that already.
The tumble of words from a
desperate mouth and the
letters still stumbling
home half-drunk, naive.
If I knew you were going to leave,
I would have kept my *******
mouth shut.

I have regrets.
The night the moon wouldn't show
its face and how a confession
felt less like a confession when
mumbled into the side of your neck.

I am still waiting for you, still
counting sheep after they are sheared,
blinking at the shrinking horizon inside you.
Maybe if I could touch you again,
I'd find the braille there that would
make me understand.