she tells me that we’re coming from the same place
that you are equally blinded by that
white hot
scalding terror
whose fingers wrap sensuously
around my neck and
choke out any semblance of hope
asphyxia hallucinations of
your back as you walk away
and the image is burned into my retinas
as if i foresaw it from
the moment i laid eyes on you
as if the entire story of our relationship
was written into the chocolate profundity of your irises
and i knew you’d disappear into those
bottomless pupils
that i can’t read but can
taste the fear like acrimonious premonitions
of inevitable abandonment

i don’t think you want to hurt me
you don’t intentionally impale me with
the flaming sword of my own inadequacy
more likely i throw myself upon
that funeral pyre
but what else am i to do when
you won’t trust me even though
i’ve laid myself bare
and flayed my skin off the bone
to prove to you that i’m
open
and all you’ve done is ride in on your
white ******* horse
and remind me that
****** never win the prince
and am i forever tainted in your eyes
for a past filled with
all the attempts i made to
rid myself of nameless pain?

i never thought i’d see my 21st birthday

and do you know how it feels
to live knowing when you’ll die
a best used by date stamped across my forehead
reminding me that
nothing really matters in the end
eventually the pain will melt away
and i’ll float into a warm nothingness
the world will go on spinning
but i didn’t want to spend the ephemeral time
here on this earth
in agony so i
stared that pain in the eyes and vowed
to destroy it
and when i realized that was hopeless
i had no choice but to destroy myself
for i would never be able to extricate myself from
that anguish
so i wouldn’t give it a vessel to inhabit
i would starve it away
purge it away
cut it away
burn it away
smoke it away
**** it away
but in the end it never really mattered
because i was going to die anyway

you don’t know that life
my life before i met you
and you’ll never realize that all my actions
were incarnations of my loneliness
and desperation
me groping in the dark for a light switch
or a bullet hole
to take my leave from this
terrestrial prison of perpetual pain

you don’t realize that i never thought i’d meet you
that the world i inhabited had
no room for you
or even the idea of you
because the thought that things would get better
only made everything hurt worse
and it wouldn’t be so easy to die
if the potential for better days to come
lived inside me

though my loneliness was my pain
i couldn’t bear to not be alone
to open the doors to my heart and
let out the musty still air
and light a fire in the hearth
a light to ward off the
obsidian nighttime world i call home

because knowing what it would be like
without the pain
basking in the warmth of the sun’s
glorious acceptance
would only make the night darker
and my loneliness colder than the
absolute zero of my past

you can’t miss something you’ve never known.