I am under a rusting fountain smoldering
Smoldering, mold, brownish residue
That felt your casual heartbreak yesterday
And last week
And every year
You used to climb the tree over there and look up into a stonewashed autumn sky
When there were no more books to read
You lost your first tooth in his neighbor
All the trees you named after characters from an epic story
That you left behind when you turned 12
Along with your hopes of success as a lone wolf or warrior

You called me into your thoughts just again this morning
I wriggled inside the room trying to get you to notice me
But your body was still and focused, no longer lacking

There was a timeout and a fear of rabid animals
There were ideas about how to deal with terrorists on your home turf
There was a dead snake in the woodpile
There were tiny embroidered cherry blossoms in heaps of laundry for your dolls
There were ugly apples falling onto the deck in September

I can’t help you anymore
Despite my admiration for how you’ve changed
Drop the dead leaves back onto the undergrowth for someone else to pick up

Death to the ******* demon _ _. Death to existence.
Cordial in a crystal bottle doesn't impress
me, Me? I've glazed over like a technicolour dream
in sickly black spit-up and half-uttered heresy
I mourned that loss of my anchor so maybe I should get
another one tattooed, eh?
Late at night I hear purring and engines
Every night I hear the cats screaming
Looking around from behind my eye lids that require a can opener
Somehow I can't seal my mind off from you though.

feet up on the metal chair outside the corporate coffee chain
we both proclaimed to hate
i rode past you on my bike and caught your eye
which shifted with your body into alertness

i didn’t miss you then, remembering
how happy your eyes could be and how warm your voice
i still believe you aren’t afraid of anything and that’s why
i adore you
but it’s all right even though you’d rather not see me
and your cold breath left impressions all over my room

embrace the process, said no one,
but i realized anyway
every happy ending is just a memory the next day
so is every night that something real becomes too real
suffocating you

i still don’t blame you
between all the books you tried to explain to me
and the ones i tried to explain to you
the missed glances that meant something only to you
the ugly crying i couldn’t keep you from seeing

i’ll make it through some way or another
but every time i see a figure in black
or remember my body in its totality
i can’t help but think of yours

the feelings come back every now and then
and they don’t feel great
but i’d rather be unmoored,
drifting in a sea of the residue
you left behind
than weighed down by some fake anchor

you said you weren't cold outside
meanwhile i melt but
my fingertips are still numb from stroking
your hair in the spot above the back of your neck
and you say
that's not helping, that it's hard to leave me tonight

that was a mistake, i try
to say, but it's easier to lean into the
inevitable regret
that we now share, if we can share nothing else

I told you almost everything
and it was as pathetic as I knew it would be
the only thing I kept from you,
the only thing I kept for myself, a secret beautiful ugly tragic thing was how the first time you kissed me, next to the stairs of an underground parking structure on a clear night with your hands on my waist, when you tasted of cigarettes and vegetarian sushi and I completely, unwittingly, kissed you back, right then

I never saw colors before

to me hedonism feels like reading wikipedia articles on religious figures, avant-garde jazz musicians, neighborhoods in brooklyn.
nothing is more self-indulgent than drinking hot coffee in bed at noon and refusing to look outside instead of doing the work or the art i should
and i think, "who in the world would ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever
want to see things the way i do,"
because it's pretty lonely