So how did I become the kind of person that I am
By changing every part of me I couldn't understand
I wonder what I'll find inside the skin that I suspend
Or maybe what I've lost is more apparent in the end
And where is all the evidence I carried on my back
The weight of it has turned it into something inexact
A haziness pervading what I once believed to be
The only inconsistency I wanted to perceive
Secure in all my shakiness but never unaware
That I was going down a road that wasn't even there
And maybe in my head I thought I'd save a place for you
Until I came to realize that's something I can't do

Do you also wince at the seeds of a watermelon
crawling there inside your mouth?
Do you also feel the bile inside begin swelling?
No way now it won't come out.

I eat only the ripest from the market
yet am forced to spit out with haste.
All the maggots and vermin seem to target
just the fruit I yearn to taste.

Life is a malicious prankster
and whatever grows are her tools.
If you're handed lemons, don't thank her-
for the only ones who take it are fools.

I used to think
that everything would be
easy;
that my pallid brain conveyed
some intricate foreshadowing
of a life unseen, but beheld
like landlocked love.

What I know now is this:
love is a place
without maps or atlases,
where the sea smolders
gracefully into
the horizon,
and my eyes are too tired
to look past the shore.

You were like the flowers
dying on my kitchen table.
Wilting away, and even so,
gifting me with flashes of color
and the unceremonious bloom
of a forgotten bud.

You were like Billy Holiday
at 3am on my busted record player;
just the slightest hiccup
in your melancholy.

You were an insufferable
embodiment of self-doubt,
nearly tangible in the
sun-starved days of winter.

You were an enigma,
plain and simple,
as nondescript as the fog
before a sunrise in September.