I took up smoking to replace one bad habit for another
(and a little bit for a taste of that head rush you used to give me).
I watch as my heart walks around downtown, outside of me;
and in my dreams, I’m pulling out my teeth for you.
It’s all these ******* mind games and those girls with bigger chests.
Can you recall one freckle off my sunburnt face?
The only thing I could ever leave with you were those bruises on your neck.
But even they began to fade the moment my mouth left your skin.

I left my broken bones at the foot of your bed.
I had planted my roots in your shoes, but I didn’t know where to grow after you left them in the doorway.
How can you expect me to live in the shell of something that once made a sunrise look dull?
And what do you think of when you see my last name on a street sign?

You’re a flood, seeping through the cracks of my resistance
and wrecking the ships I built to send my memories of you out to sea.
You swallow up the shore and I’m left drowning in your waters.

You’re an earthquake, annihilating what I once believed was stable ground.
The floors I walk on disappear when you do.

You’re a tornado, showing up out of the blue, uprooting any sanity I have left.
The way you leave makes it seem as though there was never anything else before you.

You’re an avalanche.
One wrong move and it all comes crashing down around me.
Overwhelming, suffocating, and all at once.
You consume all that you touch.

I’m more of a car-crash. A careless incident that could have been avoided if someone had just paid closer attention. Or maybe there’s no such thing as an accident, and you were always meant to destroy me. Perhaps in a simpler fashion, like a slow-working poison, infecting my dreams and eating my sleep. I was always meant to be destroyed by you.

I keep thinking that if I don’t pick up my pencil shavings, you’ll never be able to forget about me. Even if you always clean up the mess, the smell will seep into your skull; so much so, that every time you touch a pencil, it will remind you - of how you were always cleaning up my messes, and of how I was always writing about you.