No one ever taught you how to grow up
the simplest things like which fork to use when you are dining with her parents for the first time
or how to change the fire alarms

So when you sit down for dinner you use the desert fork for the salad and wonder why you got yourself into this mess in the first place

and when your house goes up in flames you scream to the sky, you burn down with it.

I know this foreign method
     made my throbbing veins its home
'cuz the familiar's not familiar
     and I'm not fine
          lest I'm messed up on
wine.
     And 9/10 of all the times
I've tried to crack a smile
since I lost you have
turned out as half-assed lies.

I wander streets, worn out,
while I wonder where you are
and what you're thinking about while
     you drive down Henderson...
          I'll try to dry out
          from time to time
        but fall back into bouts
       internal I'm interred in
       eternally--and I'll never win them.
       I'll. Never. Win them.

Not without...

          Sorry...

I meander through months while
     you walk through my mind

--and I'm glad if you're happy?--

     but you were quite angry
    with me that night I took
     and torched our collection
     of 5 years' shared memories
          QUITE ANGRY
             with me.
    And the things you said were mean
          but you meant them.

And you were right
About how wrong I was
how bad I am,
and how I taste
like lemon lies
on the tongue.

     You were right.
     And I'm drunk.

And sad and sorry and selfish
and stupid and absorbed by a
salted skyline of cold, purple steel
          every night.

It *****.

You teach kids for a living,
about the age of 9.
Me? I try to dry out
now and then, time to time,
but it's hard.

And you're far.

And I'd still come if I could,
     but it's hard
     following this heart
     when it's buried
     at the confluence
     of the Red and Assiniboine
          Rivers.

Beneath The Forks...

And that heart? Like the ground above it,
     it's covered
with ******, commercial architecture
and the clothing of bureaucracy,
     but ****,
      we had fun there.

Didn't we...?