affection has an expiration date.
becomes affliction,
turns sour like 4 month old whole milk.

love is always past due.
thrown away fresh out the oven,
now hogged during family dinner.

take what can only be given.
nothing can be given.
only take. it expires.

What do I think we are
Did I expect to see stars
Spining around both our heads
Forgetting the path that I fled
It all sounds so silly to me
Going back to such lived misery
How can I entertain my delight
At the thought of being under your spotlight
It all felt so decided, quite final
Like our last song on a vinyl
An album played ad nauseam
Swimming circles in stagnum
But a tale as old as time
The whimsy to rewind
In my attempt to create closure
I found the itch to flip our record over.

I live conflicted
between the life I'm gifted
and fault lines that have shifted
under my feet
for a dream delete
under the concrete
mob elite.

The grass isn't green and ****
I stand here beetle bit
I can't seem to sift
through the needless rifts
brought by greedy grifts
and seedy spit
on our supply side cliff.

I stand out of the range
of the morally deranged
which is how they arrange
my inability to effect change
which puts me down in the count
and down on the scoreboard
so I can't purchase a mount
to start moving forward.

I'm the disease and the antidote
I'm the hunter and the antelope
water rushing through the dam I broke
flooding the land of hope
with my brand of nope
down a tantrum *****.

There's a cynical patter in town
saying it doesn't matter if I drown
or if I burn
either way I suffocate
then put into the ground in turn
they just listen to sounds that churn
as the unbound learn
there are hounds on Earth
that scour the turf.

I sit on the sidelines
begging them to stop
but then I find I'm
cheering the beating of cops
after seeing their glocks
protecting nothing but stocks
when an uptick in mops
is what we should want.

I am the owl sitting in the tree
I am the fowl dead among the leaves
I watch the world turn from my grave
where I burn as a slave
just to return to my cave
to repeat this the next day.

I cannot explain all the pathetic measures
my eyes will take to avoid your gaze,
all the paths my legs will journey to avoid bumping into you on my way home.
All the ways I knead my hands to the bone and all the toothpick excuses skewering my tongue.
And I cannot explain the way your presence deflates something inside my chest.
I don't know what to do with all that empty space. It echoes.
I fill it with the thimble's worth of pride that I scrape together,
every meager flake of validation I pick from the floor. I shovel slopping handfuls of sawdust
to try and soak up some of the shadows
but everything dissolves in that oily void, green and hideous.
God, it echoes, and everyone hears it.
I muffle it with my radio silence.
I look at you and I see everything I hate about myself
under a microscope.
Every blemish, every scar, every gaping hole
that you lack.
Stop, look. Here. Wrong.
Hear?
I blind myself with radio silence.
I don’t know how to live with an eternal reminder that I am incomplete.
You, and the place you hollowed without even knowing it.
Green and monstrous.
It echoes and everyone hears it.
I love you, but I cannot explain my radio silence.

Who knew I could be so
L
              O
                              W
But so
                                   H
                      G
           I
H
at the same time?  

It seems like my emotions are chosen at
               R                                      D
    N                    

                                      A
            
             O
                                                M