I wanted to be your same color
living in a world where back roads racing,
fathers up-and-leaving,
mothers smoking in the house with the baby
is taken into caviler stride-by-stride.

**** your hat a little farther to the side
and tell me this all don’t matter.
But it comes at you in vivid splashes,
when you try to sleep under
the lumpy comforter
in the bed that I made for you
while you were in the shower

And you call me your beautiful angel,
in stark washes of fluorescent lamplight.
You’ll take the pills to sleep at night
and I won’t
I’ll just lie there pretending
until you wakeup late and groggy
And you leave me.