it’s funny
because i learned to love you, but
i never learned to love or hate the dark
and i don’t understand why
because you are so much alike

there’s no start
no middle,
no ending
to you
and therefore no mending
for me
in my head
because i keep trying to hold you
to get a grasp on something
to make it
make sense
to try to feel even the slightest bit less
dispensable
but you just keep going and going and going
and going and going
and going
and i always fall short
no matter what i do
there’s just no holding on to you

i don’t know how to proceed
i don’t know what the darkness needs
from me
or what i need from it
or how to fall asleep
without the upstairs bathroom light lit

it fills in all the holes, I guess
that’s something.
all the rips and tears
(and other types of tears)
and the peeling paint chips
and broken pencils
and crumpled diary entries
and breaths full of anything but oxygen
and phone calls that ring and ring and ring and ring and ring
and ring and ring
and ring

it’s ink (the dark)
it’s thick
hard to move in
and the stains don’t come out
of my clothes and skin,
its blotchy evidence
forever dinned
into me,
into who i am
but I’m not exactly in the interest
of giving a **** just now
because it fills the desperation,
doesn’t it?
all the stupid aches and
intrusive emptiness
that have been shredding through
this tired little room
at least three thousand
nine hundred
and seventy two times a day every day
since you left
(what with all the tiny gaps and chinks
and leaks and cracks, despised
because they could have otherwise
been occupied
by you.)

it’s ink
it comes and it goes
and when i wake everyone knows
because it’s caked on my eyes.
everyone sees the stains.
they might not notice, but all the pain
they see in me is reflected
in their eyes
when they greet me
and i just want
the dark to come back
so i can at the very least
be surrounded
by something that knows me.

i wish you were here
you know i do,

but you’re not.

so i guess the dark will have to do.