We aren't a "thing" anymore
Sometimes as the time passes
Like water flowing over pebbles in a riverbed
And we are shaped by all that time
I forget who we used to be.

If we took casts of ourselves
Would our faces even look the same?

The experience of being with you
Stolen phone calls across the distance
Did it change me?
Eight hours away and you're as real
As this statue of Adonis
And on a pedestal too.

Yet, everything dies and
Somehow we did too.
I'll never forget when you said I love you.
After that, when I admitted I loved you back
I've never felt more weak.
Why?

Because us?  We started as a game.
Who could be less jealous?
Who could take more pain?
Who could love and snap their fingers and walk away?
My darling, I lost track of the score.
Aloud, I claim I won.
But I'm sure you do, too.

Did either of us learn anything?
If we took casts of ourselves now
Would it show anything but wasted time?
Would it show how much my heart is breaking?
Would it show you with your wife and kids?
Would it show me alone?

Run toward the light
Deny it’s fading.
Almost grab it, but just miss
It goes down, First to red
Away to purple and blue like the
Circles under my eyes that show how little sleep I’ve gotten
Fade to a lengthy black and it’s
Called night.

Night used to be your voice.
Your voice used to be
stars dotting my darkness
Like a depth of imagination
that made our words
Into something other than just
words softly spoken.

I’d run my hands down
the whole length of you
Through those miles
Speak of touches that we’d never fulfill
Fade into orange morning with
tender whispers
That were never enough for you.

You eventually said you loved me.
I still don’t know if it’s the truth.
My heart still aches for you though
I never told you because I wanted to seem stronger
That I fell for you too.
The distance that ended any hope of us
Neither of us could live with it.
Neither of us knows the truth.
An unknowing distance.

Night.

In my mind, night symbolizes bad things
Dead as night,
Things go bump in the night,
Missing each other like ships in the night,
Thieves in the night,
“A one-night stand?”
Lady of the night,
“Oh my God! How can you sleep at night?”

It is universally known that monsters come out at night
They lurk in the closets of kids everywhere
But closet monsters with their reaching claws, twelve eyes, four arms,
And purple fur aren’t as scary as you.
In the dark corner of my room by the lamp that was my mom’s
When she was growing up
Did you put your hands on her, too?

I look up and
Coming towards me
a gangrene riddled zombie
Arms outstretched, a child whining for candy
Hot mouth on my skin, saliva in my face
Tongue like tentacles wrapping around me and
I fall into that dark, unfeeling place

Night is when bad things happen to good people
When too-young children lose their too-young innocence,
I try to explain to my mom the things you did
Why I’m chasing light
She says I’m lying because you’re her father
She knows you, and you wouldn’t do that to her
I tell her it was night-time she says,
“Maybe it was too dark to see who it was.”

“It wasn’t, mom!” I scream.
Hot pokers in the form of hot tears sear my red cheeks
When she turns away from me

It was dark, that night
But not so dark that I didn’t know you that night,
That night when you took me and crushed me
And I didn’t have a choice.

But it was you.

A gangrene zombie hiding in dark corners of my bedroom.

A woman passed me on the street today,
a screeching babe hanging on her hip
she had a yellow bandanna covering
a bald head.

She must have had cancer,
but I didn't think about her.
My footfalls echoed on my trip towards the corner market
three blocks down the street by the Mr. Zip
where I needed to pick up butter for my
mom so maybe my sister would stop crying
once she got her scrambled eggs.

A character screeches inside my head like that baby
a little girl whose house was on fire in the
nightmare I had night before last, but I don't think of that baby
as I pass it's cancer ridden mother, aunt, sister whatever
on the streets.

I think of me, and how I need to finish
my next chapter so maybe one day I can
catch up with society and maybe escape the plight
of my own poverty, of my own disgrace.
Maybe I'll be noticed, some publisher will let me
write about this screaming kid and he'll really like what
I put on the table, what I bring to the table.
Like the butter.

The world keeps going, but here I am
I don't care about the world outside of my own perspective and
people say that's wrong but
there's nothing I can do about it because here I am
trapped in this weird vice inside my head where a world
that isn't the one I live dances behind my eyelids
it is where I live, though, but audibly, visually, sensibly
not.

My reality
It's twisted, like the braid of that yellow bandanna
on the head of that cancer patient walking
in the opposite direction of the corner market and
the Mr. Zip.
She's probably thinking about herself, too.

Screams in the pitch black
Turn to butterflies, moths
Lilac wings beating wisps of air
Like wisps of ghosts
Invisible people, touching, reaching
Grabbing, pulling,
gnawing, curling around
Each part of the body at all times
The feeling creeps into the mind
Each and every day

Tossing on the blankets in bed
Latching, anchoring to them
Hands hold so tightly that the
Knuckles are white and
Ache with a deepness,
Like the deepness of
An endless black hole
And falling, nothingness surrounding
Every part of the body
Every part of the mind

Violently flailing, scratching
Clawing, dragging, raking,
None of them win the battle.
It grips us in the times
That our resolve falters
In our own darkness
Our own corner somewhere
between the synapses
firing terror
Our own abyss

Look back on the life of a man
The minute before he dies
While those machines bite into
shallow skin manifest the last heart noises
And shriek terrible monitory sounds,

He’s giving up.

It’s the glow of those machines
that only witness
whatever death he faces

Does he confront them?
Shouting around the
tube stuck in his throat

Does he think back
in high school
when he lost the basketball game
he missed a three-pointer
And he wasn’t good enough
Does he tell the machines that he was? lonely.

Will he tell them he loved a girl once,
Loved her, and left her
For being afraid
Of all the dark in the world.
Will he tell them that he thinks of her

Does he make sure they know his will,
Will he ask them where he’s going to go
Into the shadows of forever life

I think he does.
And I think they answer him,
Shrieks of noises that mark his death
With sudden silence
And they are words that only the dying can hear.

Here’s where poems come to die

A child sits alone,
But isn’t really alone,

His mind fires colors and shapes
Into all empty, black spaces
He hears the voice of his best friend, Henry,
They’ve known each other for two minutes

The child knows his story,
How he came from the same place
that the fairytales do.

The child’s heart is open.
The child’s innocence creates
And Henry smiles, his red
hair a strange color with no name.

And they laugh,
The child watches a small horse
Graze in the tall grasses of the prairie
Henry laughs because he’s always been ticklish
Right under his arms.

They whisper about their adventures
How Henry saved the child from
Oblivion.
From the job of constantly pitting peaches

From the centipede as it marched
To a war beat that only Henry and
The child can hear.

Years later, the boy doesn’t know
Henry.  
And he doesn’t know he ever did.
That was beat out of him
After he stole his first pack of chewing gum.
And looked at his first *******.
This is where poems come to die.