I thought I forgot you
I thought I long had you buried
Deep in my memory.
I thought you could no longer haunt me
Like you used to do so often.
I thought I got over you
Until your eyes met mine today,
Once or twice at most and that was about it.

I couldn't look at you,
I couldn't look at you without bursting into tears,
So I burst into laughter instead.
And I suppose that you saw through my fake act.
Anyway...

You were there in your corner,
There in your pedestal,
There in your elegance
Drawing something dangerously beautiful
And you were beautifully dangerous.
And I,
I could only watch you from a distance
And learn to admire you
Without touching you,
Without kissing you,
Or ******* you.

We exchanged a conversation
About random things
You know, like
How it took me about an hour
To take a proper picture of the cat you gave me,
How it tragically died,
How I didn't cry when it died...
But I actually did cry when it died...

You looked all right, seriously.
There in your peaceful world
That I no longer was part of.
There in your artistic mind,
There in your capacity to forget,
There in your tendency to break promises,
There in the awful effect you always have on me.

So you said goodbye
Because you had something to go back to.
I said goodbye
Even though I had nothing to go back to.

We parted ways once again,
Me with your drawing pencil in my bag
And you, you my dear, with a piece of me
Inside your pocket.

I remember you once said forever, but you only lied.
I went home,
I went home and cried.


-- Eleanor

Stopping placing me on this pedestal
Of your high expectations.
This pedestal of your high demands
And harsh words in quotations.
Building faster than I can find
My balance on my feet,
Gripping and grasping on to the edge
Not exactly an acrobatic feat.
You construct this column so high
As I struggle to keep up.
So high up here all alone,
And all I want to do is backup.
Please, I'm begging on my knees,
Up here all alone and I feel a lone breeze.
Only the sky up here on this solitary pedestal so tall,
And the higher you place me, the harder I'll fall...

Memory

     is  the birth of cool, it is rapture and ignominious spokesmanship unearthed. Packed into a slatted-wood crate, milking the obsession from cash-toting hands. Freeing itself from your bottom lip while life ticks itself away on a digital stock-exchange display. I am down and you are up, and you save pennies while I search for Chrysanthemums and vanilla-scented candles. Scent is my fifth grade spaceship,
     I hide it in my pocket and take it into the forest when the week is over. Adventure is the part of our story that's caught in between complaining about money and having clean sheets. Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday my hands mend themselves back from bleach, their crevices cave under bright lights, I go to the garden strip and put dirt on my face, over my shoulders, and on my back. I make a altimeter from an alarm clock, and worry what will happen if your feet should ever touch the ground.
Relief
     is a sarcophagus, the satiny silk chrysalis I weave into invincibility. I make myself a small child with a demon-proof lair, no one comes in, not even you.  I see

     how drugs take out your heart and put you anew, fresh: orange, pink, ultramarine. A wave is a soft gesture for twilight, a slow walk among the greying statue towers, bliss extracted from person to person tedium. How you exclaim about **** music as if your temple home was unfocused by jazz or synth-electro.
     I forgot your room of quiet had no bells, no hope, and no notes of resolve. Tragedy was the desert of your six to sixteen, while I made an opus out of crystal glasses and Cran-Raspberry jars. Then it was the relief, Neptune's hands on your *******, red dots of ecstasy connecting you to a higher vibration. You felt it was time to start exercising. I didn't **** you for modifying your perception of color, degrading in a salt pool- I didn't own your ****** it was just a place I went into to write.
    
    Three years later. I was growing backward, I was sixteen, making you the muse in my doorway, a James Bond goddess unraveling my fingers on her silky skin, except your golden crown was really a turban of snakes, and instead of silk I was groveling underneath you. That was the sweat that Ryan Shultz said I garbled up into two pedestal doves, I aimed by eyes straight at the city of gold, and then inside me shucked out every piece of self-respect and vitrified my spirit, castrating my lips and my tongue for something to come to or come at, he said I lived under pointed stars and that lying isn't a good way to get over past phases of silence.

     A few days ago, it all game back to me, in a random series of songs on an iTunes playlist. One memory from an isolated beach outside a strawberry patch near Santa Cruz, a second, two hands cupped over the ears, my face closing in on her smoothed-out pink bottom lip on an over-exagerated car ride to the San Francisco airport, and the third was the mention of non-vegan banana cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, a birthday I celebrated several years earlier. All of them in the coda.
    
     Verse four unbelievable. It caught me straying from the next stressor at hand. What's next? I move my cold hands from a keyboard versing strange relapse of mind, or I tear out another page, whip across town, and peel stamps onto a postcard to send.
     They were all tails from a memory. A slowing ghost that cooed at me from far away, beating me up and down, pulling my eyes away from a scent I continually tried to remember.

You cut me so deep
that I wanted to bleed
You weren't what I wanted,
to me you were a need
Basically, you were
a necessity of life
If you cost all the money in the world
you'd be worth the price
At one point
you could've been my wife
Every thought I had about you
just seemed so right
Your name, your smile, your stare,
your smell, your walk, your hair
You were perfect, everything was there
What I didn't count on was for you to not care
I can't believe I wasted
so much time
I could've saved ink
when I wrote those lines
telling you
how much I loved you
and how I would never
put anyone above you