I wanted you to pick apart my brain
With a fork and a serrated knife
A dinner plate the size of my broken skull
I only wanted you
To digest my recurring self-doubt
It was a futile notion

I wanted you to sift through the debris
Popped joints and dislocated jaws
A hammer crashing against my temple in a daydream
I only wanted you
To feast on my self-apathy
That would be enough

A ******-up boy dealing trash
With his tongue in my cheek
Fists clenching tufts of hair
Bodies intertwined and crash
I only wanted you
To bruise and break my skin
Was that all too much?

I wanted you to push your fingers
Into the soft fleshy parts of my head that made me see the world so differently
Maybe if I let you play with it like putty
You'd mold my mind correctly

I can still taste the alcohol on my tongue.
I can still feel the adrenaline from that run from the cops.
My mind is still lost amiss my drunken words.
But at least I'm still alive.
This is not who I am.
This is not what I chose to be.
But just for tonight, just leave me be.

They hold hands and
take turns being outwardly sad,
cry in separate cars on the
way to work, eyes always
sore and checking in the
wing-mirror-
The house is too quiet for
them so they have the TV
constantly on in the
kitchen but it's
nothing like the sounds they're
missing.
Sometimes she drives to the
pre-school and stares in feeling so very
empty and sometimes he
sees her there

(so he turns round and leaves-
they don't speak of it at dinner).

something snapped in me earlier this month
i think it was the bough that held most of what was rotten inside of me
but it could've just been the breath i was holding ever since the day i declared that your absence was never permanent, but i realized that this time it is
but this is not a poem about hoping that what goes up must come down, and what leaves you has to come back around
it's about how the clouds are looking more like laughing children
and i hear the birds in the morning without mourning you at the sight of an empty chair
i have found truth in a kind of beauty that has nothing to do with you

two weeks ago, all i thought about was what kind of person you have become and if they are anything like the person i fell in love with, but

if i've learned anything about love from you
it's that sometimes it means screaming until your voice shatters and other times it's found in silence
or growing out of old ways and apologizing despite only having fallen so hard, you left a crack in the cement

i've learned that the only reason anyone could ever replace me is because i left a hole big enough in their chest to need replacing
and by the end of it all, i got to laugh and cry and *** and be the truest, most human version of myself in the presence of someone else
i have a whole lifetime to do it all over again

i loved the things that you would do when you were you
that is enough for me