it's about learning that love doesn't come with an address
rather, a skeleton you hung in the subconscious element of your closet
i'm learning the grey area that resulted in the clash of our existences is something i don't fundamentally need
three days ago i realized its something i don't want
hey i'm still writing to you as if it were my career and i'm learning that
with you, i never had to taste the metallic tone of closure
i just, left. you didn't know
my last "i love you" would be the last and
instead of writing you novels and sobbing in between
every page, i stomped my feelings into bottles and lately i've been busy imagining the emotion that comes along with splitting a fine wine thats festered in my gut for quite some time
maybe i'll share it with my mirror,
sleeping on the floor is becoming much too frequent as is getting drunk off of emotion, only to
wish you were here

she's teetering on her own brathern image, her own contradicting existence. sitting, half-smiling, chewing on her sweet cigar who's tendrils of smoke are fully about you,
although, you could bet your last dime she'd never tell you
you don't quite know where she came from or wheres she going, she hasn't a clue either, she motions to her past with her eyes. you don't ask, you don't want to. drawn out, the color of polluted
icicles, the color of last winter when you forgot your promises. the room is silent, comfortable silence.
plywood paneled walls are stained with a raw throb of life
as if
as if
she wasn't so pessimistic about her love & the lack of it, no
the plot won't twist and yes love is lost, again
saddening? possibly, but frequent, similar to the way that she couldn't stomach a goodbye from him sometimes, to the point that she'd never say, to
the point where she'd break down in the front seat of his car on a thursday night screaming things weren't supposed to be this way.
she wants to know what runs through his mind when she's
talking circles and acting
heartless as always, but maybe she doesn't, maybe she liked the questions, it put her to sleep at night
she liked trial and error, mostly because every prediction of error was right, the ****** case
mystery, leaving without a single charge pressed or
a single trace left
she liked how love could transform from the fantasized fragment of a
slow form of magic to the painted tunnel on every wall
she keeps colliding,
her heart beat still falls
short every time she utters his name,
like the reminisce of a supernova,
in all the oddest of ways

maybe earthquakes are just god playing the piano and
maybe my anxieties are construed from the amount of times you said you missed me and i said goodbye
as if you'd ever stop seeing her,
as if i'd ever stop drinking
but when i see you every few months or so, it's as if the
planets are aligned again,
for that tiny speck of time,
only to part their ways and neglect
to recognize each other's existence
until gravity inevitably pulls them close,
the universe feels quiet. time could freeze,
things could heal,
but maybe i'm so terrified of you calling me to say the only mistake you made was wrongly defining the word "love,"
that each moment spent saying you wanted to love me again was entirely out of boredom,
i'll tell you how i watched love die in my hands,
the mistakes i didn't see until i had written them in ink

i've never had time for cold hands.
when you left, all i could feel was the inner sides of my palms
burning, i swore i saw every “i love you” go up in flames along
with your letters and every promise
immediately torched into something i didn’t want to believe was real,
this happens too often to be sad anymore. the only
thing i'm thinking is that i'm not, sleepwalking is only a habit,
i tell my friends to smash their rear view mirrors, tell me
why then do i keep a collection of them in my bedroom, tell me
why i visit last summer every night
tell me why i wake up in the morning only to feel like swallowing glass is an evening routine
if you wanted to know why i don’t know much besides leaving without a sound, this is it, right here, alcohol tastes better than goodbyes.  
we never bet on it.
love was only phantasmagoria, why would you shake cold
hands on such a silly dream? torches were meant to be lit and
maybe we just weren’t meant to love,
maybe the only result is bruised hearts, broken bells, and burnt palms

the sound of a car crash, the sound of your ex lovers heart breaking,
knowing it wasn't meant to be
this way, i called you and every clock stopped
i don't know how long it's
been since the last time i believed
you, last week i wanted to
night creeps up on you like the ghosts hanging in your closet, you didn't think you'd grow up to be this,
you didn't want to
and i swore in the seventh grade
never would i follow in my fathers footsteps, here i am, saturday morning
slugging wine from the bottle
a pandemonium of sadness, these corrupting juxtapositions are the only thing i speak with lately
maybe "we" were an overture for what we'd grow into, you know
the nights you text me asking why the hell i won't get out of your dreams, are the nights after you haunted mine
this,
****** penumbra, i see it too often
it shows up in the dreams where i find you too

i have this reoccurring dream, it's me,
standing unearthly in the front of the altar, did god bring me to his home or is this just what they call church?
lonesome, that helter-skelter tenebrous loneliness, estrangement all around
pews blessed with the strange vacancy i relate with the open ended depth of my heart, as if people were supposed
to be there, as if people were
supposed to believe
i'm spitting up blood now, this isn't how to mend and no; who are we kidding, this is exactly how we knew it all would end
veiled with
necklaces, wrapping songs of Hail Mary around my throat,
the layered thought that god could look down in any given second
and strangle me with his own prayer,
you see i'm shouting at the ceiling but
tears only result in bent puddles on the floor
faith only results in a plethora of bibles, and the ashes of their contents.
slitting my wrists with every unanswered scream, every unlearned rosary
he's laughing at me, he's laughing at me, this ungiving god, furnishing a strange pigment to the room, staining a strange potency
transmitting this repulsive image- this memory, of this entity, of this effigy- we're all on hands and knees. withering, it's relentless,
tampering with the various degrees of energy and just what am i here for,
maybe that question is it, maybe
it's me,
maybe it's the way i was made and maybe it's the way i never called you back and
maybe it's that the day i was created was the day god cracked and
it's rumored my nostalgia-grade voice grips the air the way his hands hugged nails
i'm sifting through the times when these mumbling statues shattered, every rejected cross was found dropped,
the day i was created god became bilious and vomited for the next 16 years,
maybe it's today that he'll stop

my brain is dousing itself with kerosene, tempting thoughts taking
form of unlit matches,
yet to spark
how do i learn the art of
living under extradited energy of this fire?
the elementals of exhaustion, oh,
how it rests as the black hole in the back
of your head.
it smells like last spring break, you know,
crazed.
i began carving
myself into something other,
you began eating less and
vomiting more.  
i wanted to believe in god,
waking up at 12pm on a sunday to
slug the nearest bottle of red, maybe,
it'll get me closer, maybe,
maybe i'll taste him
i'll become so numb i'll start to believe
i'm living for a purpose,
that theres some drawn-up reason for
my little existence,
opening old wounds or
leaving without closing any doors, any at all,
touching stove tops,
praying to 'anyone' that this is already hell, that this has
gotta be the worse, this can't
get worse,
punching brick walls to break knuckles, only to watch poems fall out,
heaving at the sight of anything and
laughing when remembering everyone leaves, even 'dad,'
shaking hands with the reflection in the mirror, the person you don't want to be, the person you're claiming 'too toxic,'
the person you're afraid to see again

he's a two ****** drinker. pleads that maybe a bit more money would subdue him, a bit more leisure, a bit more love.
every sunday in secret he kneels at the pew, screaming at the alter "if only"
if only his mother never left, maybe things wouldn't be as they are. maybe he wouldn't wake up monday morning with the wood residue underneath his finger nails, the bitter after taste of wine on his tongue and the similar symbolic stain ringing in his head.
only resemblance of religion he's ever practiced, the only proof he's shouting at god for answers too.
but oh, the nights he drowns himself in liquor are the nights he said god responded once before. claims he heard his voice... he's all shaky hands now, blood shot eyes, spitting with every word... it goes unnoticed.
we never fully learn the meaning of being lifeless until we are, until we feel the bones nearing skin & the flesh between diminishing, until our marrow is blackening at a parallel rate to that of our heart,  until we've convinced ourselves the breath felt on the small of our neck is indeed god, is indeed death, it's then that we realize it wouldn't be so bad after all in the after life, if any

i have sin written on the tip of my tongue,
i'm beginning to think i've been screaming for years
with the soul intention of committing to just something,
maybe anything, maybe nothing at all.
nostalgia takes its grip tighter than the way i imagine
the noose around his neck and tighter than the
first time you hugged me, god i swore i was meant to be there.
i think, i'm remembering things that took cover in my brain
things that didn't want to be seen,
possibly in mockery of me
i'm dripping sweat from thinking a drop of thought
could create an entirely new rendition of me in your mind,
i never cared to be okay, i never cared to stay

i do know the definition of gradual
and i do know that is the opposite of what we are,
what we were
we fell, thinking
it was all by choice.
love hit like you slamming down your
bedroom door in the midst of your temperamental
breakdown, and heartbreak hit even worse.
there was no choice in this cataclysmic equation,
we couldn't live without each other and that was something
we just had to accept

we're comparing rivers to veins and calling it a metaphor,
we're bending our backs to conform the circular shape of society but don't we eventually end up snapping? into something we didn't even know we had in us?
maybe poetry is just thoughts lost in translation of conversation between you & i, the things i wanted to say,
the things i never did.

i'm standing on the science
of leaving without a reason
with every inhalation expelling
from my lungs, i'm learning,
closure is simply cliché and it's possible
i crave knowing that from time to time,
i strike your thoughts like a brightening
bolt, shoving your memory in front of you
like an eviction notice nailed to your front door,
like you didn't have a chance to explain yourself,
like you never will
maybe the decision to never again open
your messages was unjust, but was it a decision, or
did it just happen, the way i never again
opened another bible
the way i refrain from saying your name
or thinking of how you said mine
the trees outside my window are shaking
with the same vigor you bled when
you said that you'd change
the thunder that vibrates this house
screams at me, making up for when
i left you without a sound
the roads are flooding with the amount
of times i questioned my love for you,
i dont think i ever do

loving you is driving into circles,
far beyond the speed limit, like when
you hit 108 on the highway, before you know it,
you’re ending up smashed against the
hardest brick wall in town
nobody ever told me I needed insurance
the rates aren’t going down
**** I’ve invested in you and only you but see
talking to you is talking to the blank page
ive been staring at for far too long
you are my writers block some weeks and
others, you, the only
picture my pen ink paints when scratching surface
of empty paper, my mind dispenses nothing more.
maybe if I drink too much coffee I’ll become
emotionally vacant to the point where I forget
your name, see
i try to write about the sky,
sometimes recovery,
sometimes something. but
your initials float through
the thoughts in my head and
I see you in words, I feel you in the back
of my throat
youre gone, I left before closure
could concur but for some reason
youre still the spitting image of the word
home when I hear it

your'e learning to live out the reflection you see as if your only audience were the mirror, pointing out your third degree burns just to say you’re not the only one with bones melting in trust issues,
God is wondering why he set flame to things that gave a ****,
then he wonders why you ran up to him without introducing yourself first, screaming, shouting; questioning his existence like we question our own. we found answers underneath our skin like metal, you said we build homes in ourselves but that isnt what I found, not close
you’ve been knocking on god’s door and theres no answer, 7 years later and your heel is tapping against the table so violently driven by sole anxiety, your eyes are drawn straight ahead of you, the whiskey bottle on the table remains out of focus, the liquid nearly gone but it has a presence, its there, its shaking too. its then that you realize home was wet pavement, humid august days and cigarette smoke, maybe it wasn’t so chemical but maybe i was just addicted to sharing one with you. am i not supposed to question the reason behind my principal telling my i'm schizophrenic? was i not supposed to confide in my pen to teach me how to let go? i’m sorry i thought the bible was unnerving, i wasn’t meant for unclenched fists. i’m sorry for taking love for granted, im sorry im so numb now, i wasn’t meant for paralysis, or self diagnosis, i’m memorizing facts about myself because i’ve forgotten who i was. theres a reason why the phrase goes “god awful” and theres a reason i’ve always wanted to match thunder’s harmonies, why i’ve wanted to uproot my soul and plant a new one, why love hit like you slamming down your bedroom door at the thought of me with someone new.
you want to know why the clock stopped ticking? i dropped it. the weight you lost from not eating for a week became a new weight of burden on my shoulders, my headache convulsed itself into a full on, blood-pulsing, body-ache. why could you never pronounce the name of the abandoned building you chose to explore?
i don’t want to speak in metaphorical tones any longer, stop telling me i speak poetry, because tomorrow night when i’ve far too finished my bottle of ***** the creases of my bed sheets will be shouting and whispering your name all at once, something i cant tolerate, my back is too broken from sleeping on the floor too frequently, already. my mind is every burnt out match you've ever used, i want to send postcards to every person who ever thought i had a chance. every contraction of silence, i feel it, every movement of living its overwhelming, i see it, i hear it, there is no end. there's no resemblance to the way i should be living. i’m trying to familiarize myself with the way i used to breathe without the effort, it’s not like that anymore.
you're an alcoholic, living in a ghost town of who you used to be. i'm walking the dusted roads finding recollections of things you used to care about, i still haven't found myself, i question if i ever will. you’ve shattered all the street lamps, you’ve smashed windows of buildings you’ve built, you’ve personally kicked over mailboxes and ran through redlights and you’ve deleted the word hope from your limited vocabulary and i’m sick of mediocre people who think writing is for the weak.
next time you notice my ghost, **** it.
the other night i watched you sit down at an old piano, it refused to play, you began to cry, it reminded me of the way you loved me, it’s too late for me to turn the lights back on, don’t you see i’m dead? i’m navigating my way without eyesight, i’ve stumbled on two too many tables and now my poetry is only available in the form of bashing my head against the walls until they begin to speak.
our love was clockwork. silly, time-ticking abomination of something that fizzled out beneath itself, we said it wouldn’t happen, i pretended like i didn't see it coming, we wouldn’t let it, we did. i’ve spent too much time checking your astrological sign's forecast, predicting you, but how interesting to think i’m not even guaranteed another hour-
do i want to be?

the weeks after i stopped crying myself to sleep, nights became smiles of embracing my sadness. i learned to become whole with a part of me gone. i learned to be okay with not being ‘all-there.’ you stopped flooding my mind, instead; metaphors did. i asked god, why, would he keep me writing about something that wasn’t there anymore. “what is the ******* point!” i screamed to the ceiling, to view out of my window, to myself. maybe i have gone mad. haywire, bizarre, who cares. because the nights i turned my light back on and began to write are the nights i learned the most. about living. i’m questioning god like i questioned my father on the brown paper bag he brought into the car, full of something i’d later learn destroyed many things more than my trust for him. i’m questioning god like the scar on my left hand and why i don’t remember how it got there. i’m questioning god like i question my reflection, like i used to know who it was, how i don’t anymore.

something about the way she said, maybe.
hesitant and airy. gloom.
hands trembling pouring orange juice at breakfast too late in the day.
that way.
but tell me do you know why her father left?
more so, why she left him?
do you know if the scar on her right side is symbolic to some prior injury or just a birthmark, tell me the story of why she's moved so many times. maybe you don't know her address or her favorite song but does she take her coffee black or with two sugars?
what do the colors of her sundresses taste like... what about when it storms?
is her poetry for you or about you, maybe
neither, maybe you'll never know
maybe she wants it that way.
when you tell her she smells like home-
what image dances along the movie screens in your mind?
if you could travel back to last summer would you erase the weeks she hooked you to cigarettes, did you smile or shutter at her angelic tone when she shouted "*******" for the last time?
why she learned to love plants instead of humans?
why her sighs sound like exit signs?
maybe, why she speaks in metaphors and breathes in monotones.

i swear to god our second-hand smoke
came to life that night,
yes. i am personifying the fumes
that crawled in your lungs and back out again.
"power couple." ha
my mouth is a loaded gun, i've always had ****** aim.
is that why i've spent so long
trying to avoid bullets?
is it why i began gently touching objects
that were the same shade as your eyes?
maybe the bark we carved into,
the coffee we sipped in our best months
the places we met became cathedrals and
every love letter was an obituary,
i kept sipping the sunrise until i was fully convinced
i didn't love you anymore
i self identified with the dust
collected on your top shelf,
you loved books but what about me?
maybe that's all i was,
forgotten particles you choked on from
time to time
just maybe, we were, the mantra between
dark and light. you told me
i smelled good, like "home,"
really it was just the sting of cigarettes
and maybe i got too wasted
off early mornings
to remember we were just the mountain of issues
god swept under the rug,
the half-finished mixtape
with your initials as the title, you've
never heard

i recall my first bar fight
all skeptical eyes and words i needed to spew out  
filled with hatred and abuse and
screams of a twelve year old's pent up anger,
this isn't okay- they'll tell you it is,
perfectly normal for your father to
take you to christmas dinner
at the local bar your girlfriend tends at,
maybe this is when i learned to argue
maybe this is when i learned not to flinch
at the sight of your temper,
no, i flinched at my ten year old brother
in the smoke-filled billiards room, playing pool with
forty year old alcoholic men
no, i flinched at the sound of my eight year old sister
asking, 'daddy, why can't you drive straight?'
see- CP shuckers doesn't suffice for a visitation  
and maybe i was twelve,
but if my torn ear-drum could talk
it'd tell you that hit wasn't discipline
explaining why it was mommy's fault for leaving
isn't the fatherly thing to do,
the pernicious potential of keeping you in my life,
see- the risk was exponential.
the rain fell in ropes that evening and
it wasn't coincidence your three were
the only children there,
i spoke in roman numerals and
maybe that was the last time we really spoke,
maybe three years later i am really writing about it

lastly,
we used to joke about
ending up in hell together.
we wouldn't mind it,
i used believed you could make hell seem like home.
you probably could've
but maybe you didn't want to be anywhere with me,
maybe you knew you were headed for the devil
and just wanted a friend.
maybe i was just your emotional support,
rock to rest on,
the phone number you always knew you could call.
maybe that's why after i lost my ****
you went running,
and suddenly,
i couldn't be the one for you anymore.
i hope you find someone new
to drag to hell with you

i know that when you asked to drive to my house,
i told you to have a good day
and when you said you missed me,
i told you i didn't know what to say
but if only you could see the knots in my stomach
or the explosions in my head
i thought i just didn't love you, but
i forgot i miss you instead

he's got sharpened nerves, although
he says he doesn't care much for logic.
his eyes distant and gazing and passing but whole-
similar color to the beer bottle he grasps in his left hand.
tighter than his grasp on the past, tighter than he remembered
says "God drives a dodge ram
he's the one who winks precariously when you walk by,
most days you pay little attention to, most days
you have little intention of meeting"
his veins real, they were the rivers studied and memorized
in geography in years past
he says "there's no use in loving shattered glass and broken memories and melted down candles."
"she said she loved me."
his knuckles fade to pale and white, bartender looks at me,
i look at him, quick exchange of glances as he mutters "Sir...."
his eyes a little more distant and detached than before,
he apologizes for his varying volume levels,
says "liquor used to subdue the pain. not intensify it"
tells me i'm interesting, tells me no one sticks around this long, why listen to the ashes of other hearts in the room?
tells me his wife used to have hair long like mine
his eyes fixed on the alcohol he's holding
swirls it around- looking for the answer somewhere
in the depths of his conversant bottle,
drinks it like water, creases and crinkles between the skin around his eyes tell me how long he's really been here
tells the bartender he's been alcoholic for twenty-some-odd years,
but he's never known what a happy hour felt like, says he never will.
tells me to stay in school, says he extinguished his potential like the fire did his home, crushed his future like his last five beer cans, couldn't care less
but he does.
there's wires under his skin and he's all broken radios,
says he meant to fix it a few years ago, says he never did
tells me she had a voice like a bar fight, like an open window during
the storm-
nothing was quite the same afterwards

was it love or open heart surgery?
i think it'll take me years to find the answer
because well
for years you were my answer
and i'm beginning to learn you don't matter
all that much.
it's strange how something so small
can become something so large
and vice versa,
like how you drove my heart
through the brick wall i've been
staring at for too long
how you woke me back up
how you never said i wasn't enough,
how you loved me more than i've
ever seen someone love another,
until i lost you too many times.
all my strings came undone and
my marbles went rolling and
i had this steady voice in my head telling me
something was missing. reality wasn't real anymore.
this is emptiness and i'm learning to embrace it
this is me yelling at the god i don't believe in
this is tracing the remnants of your veins, like
the roadway map i followed to forget us
this is me meeting the day i met you
i'm shaking my soul so violently maybe
i'll shake you from my memories too

i’ve always preferred rainfall over sunshine.
maybe that’s why i preferred you.
but maybe
when this plane fell from the sky
there were no life preservers or
oxygen masks or second chances.
second chances was another way
to write paradox
second chances were inscribed
on to the back of my throat
like paintings i couldn’t see,
paintings i didn’t see until we
had been drowning for too long.
sketched in my soul were
all of the things i should
have said to you, all of the
things i could never say to you-
i wasn’t decent enough
for a second chance anyways
i’ll wash my hands instead.
this time i’ll use my blood
now,  
i hope every time you kiss her
you cough from my poems
caught in your throat
and every time you hear my name
a house fire starts in your lungs and
when it reaches your eyes you
have to pretend you don’t feel the burn
and every time you tell her ‘I love you’
you stutter from
the sound of my voice,
like an eviction notice,
nailed to your door
like the god you once believed in.
you used to plead slurred words saying
i made you okay,
i’d stand there in silence
wondering if one day
you’d notice the thunderstorm
that i really am

i've decided
i do miss the way you said my name
in the most innocent, casual sense
i dont even think you meant to say it
and i don't think i really heard it,
but i hear it now.
i feel my heart sink a bit closer to the floor once i realize
the sound of your voice is beginning
to transform into a memory, something foreign, something i don't know.
you spoke your tones through my name, sometimes your anger,
sometimes your apologies
attempting to vent what i feel through the bottom of my pen familiarizes me with what it was like for geologists to come up with words for how the continents fell apart,
and why planets can't be planets anymore.
your voice had varying volume levels just like my love for you and i'm sorry i'm bad at timing,
bombs come with warning labels,
and the nights i couldn't speak, i pointed
at mine.
and the nights i could speak, i told you,
you shouldn't await your detonation.
i tried

what is this...
your 45th year?
maybe 46th. who knows
i know that last night the scar in my ear drum
woke back up- shouting at me.
reminder of the abuse i've encountered...
[hey this is good and bad.]
you haven't lived if you haven't been
brainwashed a sufficient amount to believe in
your father to the same degree as your god.
to blame 'abuse' and your definition of it on
your 11 year old self.
i laugh at the people who pity you,
who fall naive to your criminal ways.
[i laugh at my old self....]
maybe i should say happy birthday.
and although you didn't give a gift
or deliver a card last november,
maybe i should give you the book i read about
humans like you.
[are they humans]
is it this year you threatened to ****** my mom?
oh yeah, thats right.
i'd like to thank you for the comedy,
you told my lawyer i've never seen your drugs;
i probably needed the laugh that day anyways.
i wonder if we have different creators,
and i wonder if yours regrets his 'masterpiece'
and if not, i wonder am i truly 50% you?
because that, my friend is a scary thought to carry.
is it this year your alcoholism crashed your car?
thats right.
i know your facebook post would beg to differ but it wasn't fatigue, daddy.
[your criminal record holds to be more true than your word.]
i'm just thanking my gods your son
wasn't in the seat beside you.
thankful your remorseless mind wasn't set to **** that night.
is it this year you'll discover what you are?
maybe one day you'll come to terms with
the title, "psychopath;" ****
maybe you already know.
[you wont manipulate us anymore.]
*happy birthday, daddy.
         love always,
              ray ray

its only 11:09
and you're already drifting throughout my thoughts,
who knew pretending
to be okay
was so exhausting?
i'll come clean-
i haven't been the same since the day i left
or the day i stopped responding,
the day i changed your contact name and
the day i muted you on every social site.
it gets easier
to pretend.
everything else? the void just gets dustier,
more vacant, more longing for a fill.
i see more cobwebs and every so often,
i let the cigarette fumes air me out.
it's 11:11 and i can't pretend any longer
i haven't been the same without you
i can't pretend the distance between us
doesn't feel so wrong, in every sense of the word. wrong.
i can't pretend the gut-wrenching pain of knowing you miss me,
knowing you wonder if i kept your sweatshirt,
knowing you hope i still read the 'letter to him,' i can't
pretend this doesn't eat at me every moment.
knowing you can't hold down food eats at me every moment.
knowing i could fix you, & maybe you could fix me too.
it's mind splitting, and
i think the broken glass shards of my heart are beginning to poke again

no-
what are we doing??!
i will not feel badly for you,
or pretend to.
yes-
it's true i hope you lay awake at night
resenting the constant reminder of your missing me,
each time a rain drop hits the roof above your head.
i will not be sorry.
when you told my friend you're empty, when
she showed me the messages of your admitting to needing me-
i laughed for a solid 9 minutes.
and i do not feel badly.
i told you, i told you i told you LUST DOES NOT PREVAIL LOVE.
i shouted it from rooftops, i yelled it into the phone, god ****** i tried.
' i told you so. '
this is not a math equation. and i'm no mathematician but
you didn't believe me. i wont lie
i hope it pains your heart to see me gone and alive and well,
i hope you miss me more than the horizon misses the sun each night.
i was your sun.
i know that.
now, wasn't it silly to think you could replace your sun with some star that attends the same school as you?
i'm aware we don't reside in a heliocentric universe but **** do i know
you need me.

do your day-drinking habits subdue the ache in your chest you're exposed to every time you find yourself sleepless for two days' length of time?
i sure ******* hope so.

did i ever tell you, your eyes tasted like my mocha coffee on an early friday morning?
drizzled with anticipation and dousing me with caffeine,
i needed you, to wake up.
i needed you to wake up.
          (you didn't)
caramel was your favorite flavor
and well, I grew to like it too.
          (I always did but… more)
your eye lashes were longer than mine and i was jealous
i adored watching you blink
i remember noticing that the more passion within your voice,
the more it correlated with your wide eyes, that was so human.
so real.
did i ever tell you,
your lips accentuated every word you spoke
and no matter what you said, it was pretty
          (more or less)
i liked your teeth because you didn’t
a secret hidden part of me hopes you’ll never get braces
did i ever tell you,
your hands were firecrackers, but
familiar fire crackers. the ones i set off in my own backyard.
              
it’s the twentieth day of the month and lord do i wish sixteen days ago
i was sitting with you on the sand again,
sipping my dark mocha drink
awaiting the sparklers in the sky.
           (i think you were with her)
see I told you,
you came along with anticipation
and i kind of liked that. but i grew to know you too well
i’m growing to think that’s why leaving you was so inhumane,
unreal, just downright painful
you were my left arm. and
no matter what i ever said to you,
no matter how bruised, broken, damaging you were to me,
cutting you off was not ideal.
the after shock was worse.
and if you ever have the opportunity to amputate your left arm,
don’t.
the things you need- you need for a reason.
no, things don’t get easier with time
the empty void just becomes a bit more manageable.
i'm learning to manage passing your neighborhood without turning my head
i'm learning to manage not opening your text messages
          (more importantly, to not emotionally react whatsoever)
i’m learning to manage with a large part of me missing
and, some days I still search for it
in hidden parts of my house but
i cant grow a new arm,
or a new home,
          (see, things don’t work like that.)

i.e. such a ******* mess-- am i getting somewhere better?
i bottled my emotions,
then poured them on the floor
you slipped, you tripped, i laughed
I. i find notes you wrote me in my school planner,
this used to make me cry, today they made me laugh
II. i used to ignore your texts by opening them so you'd see but,
now they remain delivered
III. i used to get heart-pounding anxiety for going on twitter,
just to see your name. now, i've muted you
IV. i'm not scared anymore
V. i'm not scared

your hands are shaky and your mind is buzzed with coffee I can see it through your eyes-
they speak to me, tell me things about your prior life that you can't find the words to describe
it's okay, I forgive you. I'm on my fourth cup today anyways and well honestly the idea of life itself scares me, see, I'm not that courageous.
is abandoning you courageous? my friends think so. I don't, rather I think it was the cowardly thing to do- forget all emotions until I'm fully convinced I forgot how to love, no I just forgot how to need you.
I forgot that I want you more than anything and I forgot it's okay to feel,
I'm not human anymore and well that's okay

the drugs haven't worn off and neither have you.

five shots later
and you're still my motivation to finish off this bottle;
get you out of my head
my vision is blurry but
i see us smoking cigarettes on my roof last july, so ******* vividly
my words are slurred but
i could still mimic the way you said my name, as if it meant anything
my hands are shaky but
i can feel you- worse; i can feel your absence; detonating my mind

the same echo that resonates in my fourth story bedroom resonates in my soundless soul and in the ashtray that sits on my window sill
it shouts memories back at me from when we sat there
too dependent to care
before we turned cold and the marrow in our bones began to blacken
before we lost each other; to the ache of life itself
i shouldn’t have introduced you to cigarettes,
i shouldn’t have introduced you to depression or illness or satan himself
you claimed you had been there, you're different now
i’ve stained you with what i’ve been trying to run away from
now you're running away from me
too scared of pain and the void in your gut, i see you in everyone
i see you in myself
and i see myself in you
and i know that’s a cliché--
but it frightens me and settles me all at the same time,
something i don’t want to feel,
you were my home, i don’t have one anymore
i live on the streets looking for some sort of temporary house
to reside in
the homeless nights are the worst.  
i used to vent my emotions to you without using a filter,
my thoughts, my routines, me...
i closed the vent now and pour the feelings into bottles labeled ‘don’t drink,’
i store them in dark, dusty corners
of myself, labeled 'don't enter,'
near ribcages and organs and sometimes i hope that one day,
when you somewhat heal,
and your therapist tells you you’ve done well,
you’ll get drunk off of me all over again… but don’t.
don’t poison yourself,
you’re too good of a human for that and maybe i’ve always been empty
but you filled my void, and i wont pretend that anyone else can.
somedays i wish you craved the toxic drink that i am.

and i wondered who sat behind me,
staring at the back of my head while
i busily wrote emails and discussed life’s problems
with my greatest friend across from me.
while on his way out, he told me my hair was pretty
and **** do i just wish i would have said a more
heartfelt thank you.
maybe he pondered whether or not to tell me that,
who knows where he comes from.
maybe he's lived a long life and his wife has died
and that’s why he was sitting in this coffee shop alone
on a monday afternoon reading newspapers,
maybe she had long hair too.

i want to say, i'm gone.
i left you, emotionless, that
i don't care about your highs and lows because i returned the stock i bought in your life and who knows when you returned mine.
i want to say the next time your grandmother takes you to play mini golf i know you'll think of me.
i want to reside in the idea that i left you missing me and
weeks from now when you stumble across love letters addressed to me but never sent, and
you make the elementary mistake of reading them, you'll cry, eventually so hard
you have to call.
i want to say i was ever confident in anything besides you and i, but
i'd be lying.
i'd be lying, because i'd still blankly stare at your text message for a million minutes wondering how to respond until I came to the conclusion not to.
i'd be lying because i'd still stay awake until six a.m. just to hear your slurred words saying
how much you missed me.
i want to say i know how to be a brick in your stomach, how to be your broken cigarette, but
i'd be lying

i'll pack my bags and my suit case and i'll run out of this ****** home faster than i fell in love with you and moved in.
will my absence mean anything to you? i guess we'll find out
i'll risk it.
i want to live somewhere where my prescene has a value
i want to be in a home where i'm wanted
i'm sorry i'm too insecure to appreciate your efforts, but
you've changed. i've changed too.

and i'll pretend
that i am perfectly okay.
that every time i accused you of not loving me anymore,
and you told me to calm down,
my heart didn't begin to race a million miles per minute and my breathing didn't begin to weigh down my chest and my hands didn't shake like your voice speaking to my mother on a sunday morning.
granted, i may or may not have already finished half the pill bottle, but won't seven painkillers **** my pain?
maybe you'll see what you're doing to me when my vision is too blurred to read your messages

gasping
on the brink of death
and i didn’t give a ****
you forced oxygen into my soul
you gave me a reason for living
you didn’t care
that i wanted to die
you justified my existence
you fought me
and fought me
until i realized
i can breathe on my own
there’s plenty of reasons for life
(you were one)

12:15 A.M.
my emotions have turned
to liquid and they’re seeping through my pores.
please help.
you were my only anchor to any chance
of emotional stability, and you're *******
gone.
i jumped in the front seat of your car and i'm driving myself
insane.
i'm shouting at you, “just *******
come home!”
but months ago i shouted for you to leave me alone.
the sunrise is different, the grass, the people,
i need you.
i need your porcelain lips and the cigarette between them
laying in my bed because that was
my definition of home.
my fingers are cracking and my marbles
are all rolling away.
my yarn is astray besides one ******* string
holding me on to you,
and the satan on my shoulder is telling me to
let go, but also telling me to stay.

you strung my heart out
you brought me out to sea, to crush me again
i want out
i think i’m stuck- in a riptide?
yes, a riptide,
i want out
i don’t need a boat for saving
and i don’t need you to help
i want to turn around
i want to see my land
and i want out
i want to swim straight out
of your ******* ocean
before i ever let you tell me again to
‘stay’

and when i miss you
i edit pictures of your coffee colored eye
taken from last summer,
laying in my bed when life was simple.

a guilty wave of my past enters my mind
sloshing around, tidal emotion.
i see the man pulled over on the sidewalk fixing his bike for 48 hours and i see
the mothers walking with mothers, lonely but not alone
i see the ******* sun which i've been staring at for the last 20 minutes waiting to rise and i see you,
in all the ways we'll never be again
it's shouting at me to come home
but i've tried too many times
sadly missing you no longer comes in waves
i feel it in tsunami tides

my biggest fear came true. before,
you used to see a person i couldn't find in the mirror, now
you see me the way i see me too.

the nights i lay awake
far past the hour society has began to sleep
i imagine the look on her face
when you first brought her to your room.
when she first saw my name carved to your bed frame
how'd that conversation carry?
did it weigh down the air in the room
forming a burden on your back,
how'd it end?
did you tell her you fell out of love with me,
did you lie and say “i didn’t write that.”
did it make you miss me,
did your heart drop to your stomach at the thought of
love once lost and did
your head ache with the thought i could move on,
i know it did.
you were driven crazy past the title of insecurity
to the point of hiding how you felt, now
you're a blur. but i could still
rewrite your atoms better than any
fragment of the bible, and every 9th day of every month
i look for you, for what you were.
the scar on my left arm from your cigarette burn
tells more stories than any novel ever could.
the letters you wrote me, did she see those too?
and tell me, what raced through your mind.
was it her?
these are the things i’d like to ask you, but
yes i’m guilty of letting fear stop me.
the fear of those five words that could stop a heart beat
and implode a building,
that could tear open the scars on my heart and
run my mind straight into the brick wall i’m staring at,
“i don’t love you anymore”

disappeared
you were gone
you were gone
the way autumn leaves
so quickly
where did all the leaves go?
the way your favorite song ends
i want it again
and again
and again
the way my last cigarette ends
i think i’m addicted
to *you

some days,
there truly isn’t a lot we can do
to save ourselves
from ourselves
even nicotine won’t take away
the pain,
but just maybe
you can

lets throw ourselves from a bridge and call it love instead.
im afraid of closure,
so lets just go
quietly.
i’ll read your text and never respond,
never.
8 months from now you'll lay awake in bed
at 3 am
wondering where the **** i went,
and where the **** i am.
8 months from now i’ll wonder how you're doing
and where the **** we could have been
but baby I’m burnt out.
too exhausted to feel this much.
whats my mental sanity worth? i guess we’ll find out.

i thought you told me i deserved more than my last?
i thought you told me i was too kind to be this broken?
isn't it true, you said you'd mend me?
i never asked to be saved,

(but did you really believe shredding my pieces would repair me?)

i never knew how
to reply
to the text messages
that were as large as your ego.
you told me
of the dreams that haunted you
about me kissing
other people
that weren’t you
i laughed
because that was your nightmare
while it was my
reality

the sound of your keychain
i knew it was you
it was always
you
every **** time
i knew your presence
the way i knew the alphabet
the way i counted on the sun to rise
each morning.
but what they didn’t tell me,
is everything fades.
just like you faded,
from me
(you were just another lousy star)