do you remember when we use to play the nights away and find comfort in each others arms—now it's just a cold and desolate day with the sun set in my eyes and rays in my blood stream; and when i'm alone, i can still feel your eyes set on destruction as they stare me down into a little war path of lusted rage. it was you that held me when sweat matted my skin in drops of rain, when blood coated my lips in passionate ***; it was you that varnished my skin into the glass tiles when i rocked back and forth in the middle of my bath tub waiting for the ground to descend into nothingness.

and now it's you, that disbands my brain like an array of dying stars in the sky we once painted together with our trembling hands and bloodshot eyes. and now, it's me; it's me that stands in the middle of the street with blurry cars running by like angry lions in heat, fighting for the heat of the moment because they're too ******* stupid to eat their way through the decayed animals that are too far gone into the wilderness of disaster—and with their bones like melted clay in their stomachs, i stand in the middle of a highway with my hands thrown aside like a cape of darkness.

was it that your were too tired of spending contagious sad nights with me that you had to pack your stuff in a tiny suitcase that could barely fit the words I’m sorry into the brackets of their shoulders. maybe it was the way i scratched your back during steamy tales in between the sheets that scared away the words i love you from your mouth—or the way i had to pick up the pieces of the faulty mirror for you to even utter my name from your rocky eyes. i think it was the stitches in my marred bones that threw you off guard; they were too weak to carry your ego on felted silks because while you thought art was an object of disguise. i thought it was an object demanding to be felt through brittle streaks of dull colors.

it was when you shouted at my writings for feeling too much when i whispered that my words were messages in disguise because our feelings were too much to handle—and that’s when you broke the handle to the cracked, wooden door that held more blood than the inside of our hollow scar tissue. it was then when i realized that—

my fingers hurt from unbuttoning your skin, unzipping your veins into two split pieces of heated metal that slice my wrists open with uncertainty. it was the lines that the scars created that dismembered my wrists from my hands and clawed the nails off with broken bites of disintegrated love into my knuckles—when the cemented wall hit my fist with action-packed wrath of fervent wisps of outpoured whiskey into your mouth, into my breath, into your eyes, and into my clenching veins is when i knew the nights we spent were only tales of childish foreplay—heavy innuendos of vapid, misused paint on cracked paintbrushes and oil-based pens.

i’m tired too. i’m tired of my bleeding fingers used to scatter your drops of paint onto the pallet of my skin while i had to sew the seams of my veins into a cross so maybe I could find a way to God while my God was too busy fondling the idea of pain into my eyes. i’m tired of my oil-based pen handling my hand with sacred demons barking at the nails stuck in my brain while my brain fights for some sort of unasked forgiveness that i didn’t know i needed.

it was then that i realized that the milky ways in your troubled soul carried out the stars in my name—that’s what sold me the first night we met—only, i wish we hadn’t met.

The end of the affair is always death.
She's my workshop. Slippery eye,
out of the tribe of myself my breath
finds you gone. I horrify
those who stand by. I am fed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Finger to finger, now she's mine.
She's not too far. She's my encounter.
I beat her like a bell. I recline
in the bower where you used to mount her.
You borrowed me on the flowered spread.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Take for instance this night, my love,
that every single couple puts together
with a joint overturning, beneath, above,
the abundant two on sponge and feather,
kneeling and pushing, head to head.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

I break out of my body this way,
an annoying miracle. Could I
put the dream market on display?
I am spread out. I crucify.
My little plum is what you said.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Then my black-eyed rival came.
The lady of water, rising on the beach,
a piano at her fingertips, shame
on her lips and a flute's speech.
And I was the knock-kneed broom instead.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

She took you the way a women takes
a bargain dress off the rack
and I broke the way a stone breaks.
I give back your books and fishing tack.
Today's paper says that you are wed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

The boys and girls are one tonight.
They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.
They take off shoes. They turn off the light.
The glimmering creatures are full of lies.
They are eating each other. They are overfed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

I've stopped waiting
I've stopped pacing
my bedroom floor
I've stopped tracing
the places that you were in before
I've stopped my mind racing
though I find it escaping
to things that 'were'
Now to start collecting the faces
that I once wore