I'd love to
create something beautiful
from my pain,
but it's not a skill you can learn.
I wish I knew how
to do anything but
cling to you when I'm hurting,
desperately hoping you
will lift me up
but every time, you fall
with me, and then we're
slamming into concrete
again
and I think to myself,
it's really rock bottom
this time
and it's my fault
again
and you don't know
how to help
again
and the only thing
I can think to do
this time
is let go of your hand,
watch you drift away
and lay here
alone.

I'm
an overthinker
and overtalker and
sometimes when I speak I spit
and it lands on
a piece of paper and
the longer you stare,
the more it starts to
abstract from reality
into modern art.
It isn't amazing. It’s
a diversion,
something to look at
while museum wanderers whisper
behind the back you've turned.
That's vain,
right? Not to mention gross -
it's
embarrassing to
put your saliva on display,
but when you
frame it and see
your reflection in the glass,
shame cracks over your head
and dribbles down
with a twinge
of pride and
you think to yourself, maybe
I'll make another
if only for myself.

Our souls were made of
the same stuff, perhaps literally
I can feel it when you cry
or hit the brakes too hard.
And you -
you've always known
what I needed before I did.
You would trip me and
break my fall in the same breath
and you knew I'd
do the same for you.
But somehow decades of
sharing clothes and video games
kitchen fights and hospital visits
twin beds and ***** dishes
brought us here
to an airport
and even after you leave,
it won't be real
I'll still be waiting for you
to walk through the front door
and tell me to do the laundry
and you'll be in a bigger bedroom,
wishing for the chair from
your parent's house.
But we'll still watch the same movies
and I'll be there when
you break your leg or
your heart and you'll
still call when
you can't remember what that
one song is called
or just to say goodnight.
Because without you
I couldn't have ever been
myself, and we
know somehow that we
haven't really
ever been apart.

I'll find her one day, years
from now
sketching wildflowers in a field
two states over from
where we met
and it will be the first
time that I realize I
truly lost her. I never knew her
to care about art, though I knew she would
paint houses with her generosity
until she’d given her whole world away.
She put everything she loved on
an altar and watched the smoke
swirling towards God
closed her eyes, inhaling
a promise that she would receive blessing
in return. So she did:
everything that happened
had to be divinely ordained
but me - I was not.
I was the earth she
was called to leave behind,
on her journey higher
and I watched her footsteps smudge
the lines drawn in the sand
and questioned how
you could ever tell someone they
weren't going to be happy
when every ounce of their being
believed they were.
The truth is,
I never found the answer
and I can still only
pray I'll ever
find her.

The obsoletion of libraries
dangles ominously like
one big ice stalactite
just above his head.
He needs books, the real ones,
soft paper to clutch
between his fingers as he
searches for the right answers
to all the questions he
can't find,
the how-have-you-beens,
where-are-you-goings
and sometimes
what-is-your-name.
He can't keep track of the time
but he can categorize catechols and bird calls
and remember to be worried about
a greying Earth
and cling to its pole
letting it spin him round and round
until he gets too dizzy to distinguish
the letters from reality.
And he reads the fantasy novels alongside the
news, it
is all too entertaining to peer down
from his box seat
on the fear dripping from the ceiling
onto the audience.
Neither is scary to him -
fiction nor nonfiction,
not on their own, anyway -
but his blood pressure begins to rise
as he raises his eyes
to the stage
and watches them
obliterate one another.
And there he decides,
if libraries will die,
he will bear their sentence
he will fold himself into every page
and melt in between the lines of ink
and they will settle into dust
together.

I'm alone this weekend
just me and the echo
of a plate breaking
on the ***** kitchen floor.
I wish you were here.
I spent the day sideways
wishing for your upside-downness,
how you'd peak at rock bottom.
I'm thinking of inviting you here
so you could take up enough space for
the both of us,
so my pain would no longer be
mine, it would
be you.
You'd ask me to
slow dance through
your field of landmines, because
only you
knew all the right steps
and I'd
trip one
so you could scream about
things you could never understand.
You'd feed me curses
and when I got thirsty
you wouldn't know how to be water
until I was
a grease fire.
But in the end,
I'm alone here because
the only person who loved to see
me hurt more than you
was me.