I wonder
if you were looking
to be saved
the way
you always claimed
you were doing
for me

If you were to ask me what I am looking for,
I think I'd only tell you what I've found
I found love in a bathtub I lived in
My body soaked in gin and glitter
He loved me like he'd love me more
If maybe I just wasn't me
So when he moved me out of my bathroom
Into a hardwood floor home
Changed my clothes and my hair
But not my habits
He decided it was my fault
For not being what he wanted to love
And not his fault for telling me he loved me
Instead of telling me that he might one day
And if I didnt try to leave him
He wouldn't have to lock the door from outside
And if I'd just remember to do the dishes
He wouldn't need to break them
And if I'd just say yes
He wouldn't have to make me.
I found love in a basement with a guitar
Hair pulled back in a ponytail
A pipe that never stopped burning white
Crystalline eyes and cheap wine
Slow dancing in the early hours
When we wouldn't wake up, but we'd get up
And that was enough to call it morning
Until I stopped turning our pipes
And he found veins he didn't know he had
Invited death into his bloodstream
And asked if he could share it with me
In a letter written in crayon
Sent to the rehab he'd begged me to go to
And was now begging me to leave
He tattooed me on his back
So he can pretend I didn't leave him
So I'll be a part of him when he leaves.
I found love in a room full of addicts
His head bent down making art out of sorrow
I wondered if he could make me beautiful
Like he did everything else
When he met my family they found love
In the lack of bruises he left
And in the way his nose was clean
And he slept at night
And we called that enough because at least it was more
But it was nothing at all when he left
While I did laundry and cleaned
Stared at a wall because nothing was beautiful
If he didn't make it so
And I remembered too late
That people like me love everything else
More than they love those who love them
I became the one counting minutes
Believing that tonight didn't mean in a few days
Believing it was my fault
For not already being beautiful
Or maybe for loving someone at all
So if you are asking me what I am looking for
I'd say that looking got me lost
And do you please have a map

It's not what my friends all say
I don't need to be what they need -
I've overcome that particular fear
I'm only tired now and left with
this longing
it's like a mountain hyway
or a horizon moving sideways
as I glide in a boundless ferry

The longing is some long distance
I see reeling on
an idea towards an end
I vaguely put together from memory

I see it traveling in echoes,
sound's shadows
carrying on
like their only mission
for the rest of my life
is to for them to carry on

Sitting in my father's car.
No one as said a word.
All you do is look the other way.
And I am just looking at you.
No feelings
No words

Scanning your photo, who you were
is my fantasy, there is no contact
with you in that flower field near Merano

You looked inquiringly at me
at that moment, in this photo
of my and your thoughts

since then timelessly
frozen on the edge
of a black eternity

Also scanning myself
in the mirror, I see who I seem
to be and not who I want to see

They are irrevocable facets
of my truth and my lies
in traces of my existence

the light in people’s eyes
who have dealt with loneliness
glows brighter than others
because they have had to find
conversations within looking
up at the moon