You were as stealthy as a slow gas leak, by the time i knew i was in love with you, i had succumbed to you. You were in the drivers seat of my car lighting a cigarette with the windows up so i could breathe you in. I quit smoking so your secondhand smoke was all you would allow. I watched as you brought the cigarette to your lips and dragged in as if your life depended on it. It was your third one today and i told you that you should stop, maybe breathe me in for a second. Do you know what i would give to become second hand smoke from your lips? All you would have to do is kiss me and i would vanish into thin air, become a noble gas in the periodic table but there is nothing noble about the element of disappearance. I have been shrinking away from you ever since you held my hand in that convenience store a year ago. I'm trying to convince myself to get over you because all i am to you is someone to **** slowly through your second hand smoke. I never knew I could get so addicted to nicotine until it came from under your tongue. When you're gone, it's hard for me to breathe which doesnt make sense because when youre here my lungs are filled with your sweet black tar. But you will be gone for months when you leave in two weeks. You said you'd write to me, but written words can't carry your second hand smoke. You can't build a home out of a human being, but that doesn't mean i cant find a home in your bed.

I suffer from secondhand sorrow.

When other people's problems
weigh on you
like a beast.

When you ache and weep and wilt
under the pressure
of someone else's strife.

Secondhand sorrow
grips around the throat
clutches in the stomach
and beats the mind to grains.

All the while a guilt festers
in the havoc of my soul
because secondhand sorrow
weighs on my mind
while it should be free
to care about you.

As a little girl, my mother and father would drive around while smoking in the car, with the window rolled down, as I would roll up the ends of my sleeves clenching them towards my nose to be rid of the smell I have never liked.

I believed that when my parents would smoke around me, I was a smoker too. I had had the scent of a smoker too. But when I was with you, it was different.

That night, not caring how much I hated those sticks of paper as a child, I would watch you put it in your mouth and on your lips, inhaling it until you couldn't any further.  I silently sat in the backseat admiring how you would slowly inhale and exhale the toxic fumes it gave off.

That night, I went home.
I walked in through my back door.
I slid my shoes off and tiptoed toward my bedroom.
I passed my parents' room, witnessing them sound asleep next to each other, peacefully.
I took off my old grey sweatshirt and inhaled slowly, the smell of your secondhand smoke, and smiled.
Because it was yours.

I hated those sticks of paper full of toxic fumes.
I hated the smell of those sticks of paper full of toxic fumes.
Now, myself, I am one of those sticks of paper full of toxic fumes.
We both have touched your pink, chapped lips, got used, and are now thrown away.

She wraps herself up in a blanket
and tucks herself in at night.
So alone in the world,
as the cold creeps around her,
and anxiety possesses her body.

She's watched her sister poison her body
with candy from the gutters.
She's watched her mother paint her own wrists
with a knife.
She feels helpless and at times hopeless,
aching for a positive change and a chance to be free.

She sees the world beautifully
and that light burns inside and flickers in her eyes,
yet the pain she sees around her takes her hostage,
and drags her around like a puppet on a string,
and like other weary souls she slips through the cracks
of secondhand pain.

Secondhand smoke
cough
Chronic coughing inhale the poisonous atmosphere.
cough
I wish I could clear my lungs yet arguments about stupid **** infest the walls
Deep breath
What exactly is fresh air?
Loud bangs echoe through my insides nowhere to hide
My mind drained in the lies
And dear God I swore secondhand smoke was a lie

I thought about moonlight,
How stars are like glitter to the kiss of the sun,
And it's lips are the moon pursed for love,
As daylight is a echo,
And evening is the sound,
And dawn is the break that takes with it,
The silent stillness in which we are found.

We are locked like silk strands to the tree,
From which all other silk strands can be,
Worms for the food of morbid decay,
I hold your hand in my minds eyes and with my minds voice,
Tell you it's ok,
It's ok to be soft when you're a word,
When it's a last dying word,
It's ok to be bare and open,
Like the wound of the night when day takes it's first slice,
And it's alright when you're nice,
Cause kindness cured my cancer of jaded desperation,
Like fading, faded perspiration,
That came from the kiss that the moon sent from me to you,
And like a badly worded comeback it stuck like glue,
And held on like a metal surface in winter time,
To a tongue who talked too much,
That said too many words,
That were much too hard for the ears that heard,
And that's why you're my bird,
Who sings me morning love songs with your still sleeping breath,
That if I could lie there listening I could be happy breathing death,
I could be satisfied with secondhand oxygen,
If the first hand was your lungs,
Then I could know I am complete,
With the unconscious symphony that you sung,
While I laid there and thought about moonlight.

the rim of your beer can
tastes like your stale cigarettes

When its emerald eye glimmers in the shadow of the dusty shelf above
I pause,
I sense a presense.

It is not unlike me to attribute human characteristics to inanimate objects.
Give them names and nicknames and quirky character traits based on how their forms bend.

In the flickering lights of a broke wicken sanctuary though, I do not do it out of habit.

I feel it and stare it back down and see my own reflection in the cracked gems that once were a soul.

A gaudy skull.

The kind you see in home video Indiana Jones tributes,
with hats stolen from someone’s parents,
and jackets stolen from someone else’s elder siblings,
and ketchup for blood.

The kind your quirky local manic pixie dream girl uses to hold incense.

The kind I’m about to waste my money on because I’m an adult now and I can use my millennial minimum wage however I want.

I do not become aware of the possessed nature of my new buddy until I take it back home and hear it snicker in the middle of the night.

I know it is the skull, for my roommate is not one to snicker.

(He chuckles when he’s hiding an opinion and has a villainous laugh when it’s coming from a place of sincerity, but that’s beside the point)

I know it’s laughing at me.
I know this for a fact.

It takes me three more nights to call it out on it because I’ve never been confronted with the issue of standing up to a haunted antique I took home from a secondhand shop, possibly owned by satan’s offspring.
But I’m twenty-one years old and still experiencing some firsts, I suppose.

The gaudy skull is exceptionally snarky.
In a way none of my named plants ever were.
Not even Gerard.

He comes for me for the garbage on the floor and the dust on the windowsill on which he’s propped up, and then later for my poor taste in chore-doing music.

I never ask for its name because I know for a fact he’ll make a game out of it
and I am not in the mood for entertaining ghosts.

I come to realise it all on my own a couple of weeks later.
Once the snark starts to wear off,
and domesticity settles in,
and shared quiet becomes comforting,
despite the circumstances.

It is Judas.

I know this for a fact.

You do not understand the extent to which I am certain that it is Judas.
I have never been so aware of someone’s origins in my entire life.
I bought this creepy item and it is now in my room and I’m developing a weird attachment to it and maybe occasionally use it as a paper-weight and it is Judas.

I feel it in my heart and know it inside of my skull that might be standing on someone else’s touchscreen windowsill
two thousand years in the future,
jade stones for eyes even though I specifically requested amber,
but you get ****** over by bureaucracy even after death.

How do I know it is Judas?

Because I feel him stare at me like he wants to kiss me late at night and sense him plotting my betrayal early morning.

I know it is that, for a fact, because I’ve felt this exact sensation before.

My **** edgy room decor is Judas.

I try to get him to admit it himself by talking of past lovers and reading aloud the surprising number of Jesus metaphor poems I have in my room.
I hate Jesus metaphors, but I do it for that sweet sensation of seeing someone trying to dodge the inevitable once it’s coming at them like a mule through Rome piloted by the son of god.

I know he’ll cave eventually and tell me
and I know it’ll be the same caliber of glorious news as Jesus coming out of his own cave of burial,
resurrected and preaching winning.
I know I’ll win.

And I think to myself that maybe I am in the mood to entertain and just haven’t found the right outlet yet.
Maybe history’s most infamous apostle is It.
The original sinner and the original rebel.

(I’m aware it’s technically Cain, the jealousy-ridden son of Adam and Eve, but I only ever count the gays)

Judas and I have bonded.

And I can tell he’s on the verge of telling me his dark and twisted backstory. Again, I have felt this sensation before.

And when it happens, we can talk
about what it’s like being demonised by the one you love
and being the odd one out in your devotee friend group, even though you eat bread and drink wine and worship metaphor just like them.
And how patriarchal institutions distort history to pedal the same tired spiel of everything having a place and everything being there for a reason.

But we both know that isn’t true
because neither of us feel like part of god’s plan or created in anyone’s image.

And we can listen to sad music about wanting to kiss the wrong people together.

And that’s all I ever wanted from a friendship.

A secondhand rose

Lying on the cars cold floor

It was hers, then yours, then mine

And now, its nevermore