The grasp you held on my heart
once felt reassuring, securing even.
But your fingerprints left bruises,
each one an echo of your lies.

My heart became a weathered map:
torn corners by sharp words,
crumpled from venomous lies,
the trail of betrayal tracked across it.

You made me flinch at kindness,
distrust soft spoken words,
run from help, for fear
it was another trap.

Even amiability makes me brace for pain
and I know-
I will never be the same, because
love feels like a fairytale
written for someone else—

and I can only imagine the ending.

i'm not sure where i am anymore
i think i've been lost for a while
i can no longer tell the difference between up and down or right and left
i don't know how to find my way
i don't know if there is a way
perhaps i'm meant to stay here
but though i've stayed here for so long
i'm still not sure where i am

I will never again let you through my wall.
As a matter of fact, maybe never to anyone at all.
To my problems you would call,
Kept you enthralled.
And when I would stall,
Your prying would keep its crawl.
So I would fall,
To your appall.
And you would throw it in a ball,
Down the hall.
I was left to haul,
Into a shattered ball,
What you would keep cruelly mauled.
So up went my wall.
Are you really appalled?
That now I won’t open to anyone at all?

I punched that mirror
Over and over and over again
My knuckles bloodied
Hundreds of shards on the floor
Yet no matter what
Even as I kept smashing it all
Each shard is still
A reflection of a broken man

depression feels like heartbreak at sixteen  
perhaps that’s why I always think of you  
when that unyielding squeeze starts to roll  
around my stomach like a rotting stone  

it's strange to think that of all my stories  
yours is the one that always wants to be read  
we were just sketches and outlines and isn’t  
time supposed to be the great physician

it seems timing is everything Once Love and  
ours was always perfect in the worst way  
just right to wedge you between my newborn
ribs like a thistle that sticks to my bones  
  
so I chase you like salvation  
knowing you have none to give  
and I’m always running  
in dreams

I open my ribs.  
peeling back the sinews and  
capillaries with precision.  
The crack of spreading bones,  
my chambered apparatus laid  
delicately on the table.  
  
My implement extracts its pound
onto the slab with intention,  
pulled and pressed till it's paper  
thin and bled out. Soulspeak scrawled  
in the crackling veins of my parchment.  
  
I put my machinations on display  
for onlookers, merchants  
and collectors  
but none seem to gather any interest.  
Skinpull another page  
but nothing sells  
or charms or foments.  

I pack my wares and  
toss them onto the pile of  
my dried out corpse scattered  
on the floor.  
Failure.  
Another procedure.  
Relent, repeat, cut deeper.  
And hope to find a reader.

Ruminating failures
a blender inside my head  

My mind drips down  
into my hands and  
I feel the grit of regrets  
between my fingers;  
slick like oil  
with flecks of sand and glass  
the greasy residue of every moment  
grimy and sharp.  

The ineffable instant  
pooling on my fingertips;  
when fate’s trajectory skews
and twists along my intestines.
Because I know-
that what I’ve done    
cannot be reversed  
or erased.    

That I have created an apex around which  
history will revolve. A fixed point    
in the vastness of eons from which  
every other thing will spin out.  
A collapsing star- whose dying light  
will shine in the black memory of the sky  
for a million  
million  
years.  

So I sit under a sky full of blown out suns  
and feel the glint of dead lights  
between my fingers.

there is a part of me that nobody knows  
except you  

I keep it under lock
strapped down and chained  
starved, pale and gaunt  

to quiet it  

to silence it from calling out in the still  

to **** it if I could  
and be done with it  

only for you to undo me with a whisper  
with words in a line,  
with a memory  

that throws off my desperate restraints  
lays waste to my barricades  
and breathes fire into me.  
making the chaos so full and loud  
inside me  
that it suffocates me  
and i cannot breath  
or cry out  
or find relief  
except to surrender.  

a beautiful unraveling  
of skin and bone  
that strips me down to my soul and fragments  
to give everything that I am to you.  

with a whisper you could tear me down to atoms  
you are my beautiful destruction

time, the great unraveller,  
unwinding things into  
eternity with heartless determination.  
I have seen it lay rust along  
affections and arteries so  
that neither may flow or pump,  
but i always thought us, or  
hoped us, more rare  

that the constellations hung in your eyes  
would never dim for me,  
but guide me as they always had  
to home  
to you  
to us.  

perhaps you never dimmed  
only the constant erosion by minutes and hours  
chipped away my veneer, and the truth  
of me has made mutiny of your affections.  

when did I become someone you sleep beside  
and not with?  
the inches between us stretched out  
like country roads in winter, belying our beginning.  
my fingertips and your skin thick as thieves  
adventuring over the lines of your horizon  
each curve and mound and crevice  
the hot breath of exploration panting on our lips  

I can only fabricate excuses for so long,  
brushing off your brush offs,  
the turned shoulder,  
the recoil of my hand in the small of your back,  
the betraying hesitancy in your lips that  
wounds me like an unpracticed lover.  
when did you exchange your desire  
for obligations, wicked and sour?  

you blame it on chemistry  
hormones and pheromones  
molecules and valence bonds  
breaking apart our marital-structure.  
so I curse science and pray for alchemy  

I'm tired of sleeping  
In bed with you  
alone