Everett, you're tired
of sleepless nights
aching lungs
girls who evaporate overnight.
You're tired of burnt Saturday evenings,
cars parked around dark corners,
staying out too late and
driving home on empty.
I would offer you a ride home,
but Everett, you make my mouth dry.
You smell like cigarettes and
look like all my mistakes.
I want to carry you, Everett,
and watch your scarred skin flush
at my touch, but I know
all too soon I’d be
carrying those same scars on my skin.
So I’ll cry with you
from the other side of the highway,
I’ll feel your albatross around my neck
and wish you the best,
but I won’t be there this time
when you decide to burn
everything that’s good to you.

I think you should know,
I poisoned the daisies.
I told you it was the dry soil,
that they always wilt this time of year.
You cried, but you'd never
let me see.
I knew anyway.
I knew you'd cry
I knew before
I found the pages you crumpled up
and threw away,
unforgotten in the wastebasket
and burning still with your body's heat.
In the moment,
I touched a fragment of you
from a thousand thoughts away
and realized I wanted you between my teeth -
like vengeance seeks death -
like fire craves destruction -
and it splintered me.
I couldn't help but
get stuck in your thumb.
I knew it would swell and
ache like me,
I knew you’d have something to blame for
the tear-stained pillow
and wilted flowers on your window sill.
I’m not asking you to
forgive me,
I know you never will,
which is easier
anyway.

I find myself lost
when you move,
a drop flung
from your tear-soaked sleeve
to sizzle on the hearth.
I called my mother yesterday
to tell her I'm falling,
but not in love
just sinking in syrupy fascination
while you starve hollow farther
below.
I stir pity and romance
knowing we’re both lying purple
aching to feel love that doesn’t bruise
and I've been too scared to believe
it could be you.

Red midnight glares above my head
heating coals in my belly,
pushing tears from the corners of my
eyes.
Education, success, modernity
boil me - I scream to sleep cold.
Just outside the window rests
a faint outline,
the shape of my future.
A train shudders to a tired stop,
miles away
the driver
daydreams of going backwards
or getting off
I dream of today, now yesterday,
as I enter, sleepless, tomorrow: today.

You lost me, philosopher,
but did you read the poems?
You won’t, lest you remember
I reminded you again
your guilt is trickling down
like condensation on the fridge
onto the sticky note that says
remember to fix the fridge -
that’s a poem, isn’t it?
Or you philosophize it so;
I think you think
all my words to be poetry,
and I dangle, threaded
in your memory:
that’s why it grieves me such to
say, read the poems,
lose me not.

Only if she isn't the moon,
roped down from heaven,
if she doesn't keep time
for your symphonies with her step
if she leaves you as you were,
instead of fever-stricken, breathless, burning
if you forget her when she's gone
and remember how to sleep without her
then you should let her go.

Wear me tonight
in your front pocket,
pressed against your chest
like a dead flower
against fresh linen.
Pull me from Eden for purpose,
and when the sun strains against the horizon,
sew my shaking roots into soil
and forget you ever knew my name.