with time i lost the set notion of your deserving.
if you deserved my sadness and tears and screams
drenching your absence like acid.
but tonight it is strong and maybe i deserve this hell and maybe you don’t deserve my longing but
what’s done is done and
i still hurt.
i’d tell you to come home but i’ve torn it all down and there’s nothing left.
but anybody else isn’t you and deserving is a concept long lost.

i don’t know
what time or what day of the week it is.
but today or tonight or this afternoon i am consumed.
how i can’t
listen to that album anymore
without remembering
how we lie sprawled on my bed as you sang to me and played the strands of my hair like a piano,
singing words of someone much bigger than us who
probably never blinked at the notion of such mundane love.
but still the words bring back waves.

no matter
the time or the day,
i still remember.
and it still burns in the night and they day
and in the afternoon.

i don’t want to talk about it.
i don’t want to talk about how for three years
my morning routine  has been prozac and just enough coffee
to disguise the fact that i haven’t
slept in four days.

i don’t want to talk about how
the boy with the subaru coated in grateful dead stickers
loved me and how i ran because of this.

nor about how my birthday is in
19 days
and i still want to die.
another year come and gone.

i am a stranger in my own body.
maps written in a foreign language.
my ship has sailed,
my breed extinct.
going
going
going
gone.

all you've known was rot and decay.
everyday
living beneath a surface of water,
everything slow and uneven.
and then something happens and you're
on dry land and the sun makes your skin feel
warm and
the world was built for you.
it'll be heaven for a while.
but the riptide pulls
at your core
******* you back under water as
your heaven shrugs it's pale shoulders and
walks away.
you're back under water again and
you've come to a bitter end
where you can't
remember the last time you've smiled.
the water starts to look good to you and you
let the riptide take you.

empty houses with their drawn shades and
rotting porches that once held time and tale.
parents raising children in hypocritical
bursts. mothers
partially absent, drinking whenever they can.
fathers verbal abusing, and an even
louder absence.
i'll slither in through your
ears and
tell what goes on behind
closed doors.
show the inevitable futures of poverty and coke lines.
empty bottles of ***** and cheap ******.
or maybe you'll hit it clean.
suburban treatment.
grow middle aged and privileged to
watch your babies **** themselves or
everybody around them.

we're all born with the death penalty. i've been living mine every day.

my house is a home to
much more than living things.
sometimes it feels alive,
breathing beside me.
in this house lives the resentment of my mother and how
she can't feel love, the resentment for money, and monsters, and
everything else.
i love my
mother-dearest but
sometimes i think that
the only thing living is her
demons.

instead of remembering days
sitting beneath trees bleeding flowers through the
space between us and the sky,
rather than fingers tracing freckles, and tongues colliding,
i choose to remember you as you were
before it got bad.
bigger than the bad days is the fact that
you were the only person i've
ever really loved.
how through my constant nights of clenched fists and cigarette breaths,
is how i hope you're happy now
and the sun still shines
everywhere you go.