sometimes i wonder if god keeps a record
of all the times i have been left,
all the times i have been unable to leave.
i wonder if he thinks to himself,
"when will she learn?"
as if he feels my heartache too.
i picture god with a furrowed brow,
hunched over a typewriter,
beginning me again and again,
a mountain of crumpled paper at his feet.
but somehow -
he always ends up at the same point in the story
where i am all ****** palms
and half-hearted hallelujahs
propped up on bruised knees.
spitting up blood & teeth at his feet screaming,
"IS THAT ALL YOU'VE GOT?"
but he doesn't answer.
and i catch myself wondering if the silence
is his way of punishing me for making a deity out of you.
after all, the bible says he is a jealous god.
i could've sworn there was a verse somewhere
that said you weren't allowed to love anyone other than me.
but now that i think about it,
i probably took it out of context.
if i could add a parable to those already existing,
it would be how your chest
felt like church under my head,
and how i thought to myself,
"this is how it would be if he loved me back."
or how you fled my bedroom like a crime scene.
i am still bleeding.
i won't tell you how many times
i cracked my heart in half
trying to be what you wanted.
how my lips on your skin felt judas.
now i am waiting for god to begin me once more,
hoping he'll leave you out of the plot this time
because i don't think i could stand to lose you again.
see, rumor has it he knew you'd leave
and has been trying to make it up to me
since before we'd even met.
my song is one of repentance.
the wood finish from abandoned pews
rotting under my fingernails.
i made sacrifices you didn't ask for.
i have never known
whether my inability to abandon people
is more a strength or a weakness
but so far everyone i've ever loved
has turned into an exit wound,
and myself into a flickering no vacancy sign.

- m.f.

“pinky promise you’ll be there for my play?”

i don’t do pinky promises.

“why not?”

I don’t make promises that i can’t keep. because a broken promise is just about as bad as a broken tequila bottle shoved into the soft spot just below your ribs.

“…what?”

speaking of tequila, let me tell you why i don’t do pinky promises.
it was a few falls ago, three if you really want to get technical.
i’d come down to visit you on a weekend instead of staying home to study like i should’ve been.
it was eleven to eleven. 

drunk. dear gods we were drunk. we’d just stumbled out of the greasiest mexican restaurant i’d ever eaten in. 
but hey. the margaritas were cheap, and more importantly, they were the only place in the area that would serve to minors. They even included a free shot of tequila when you asked for your check, that went down with similar smoothness to the way my debit card slid through the reader and emptied my bank account a little more.


but yes. you and i were drunk. and as we strolled down fifth avenue i-

“me?”

No, i mean her. not you.

“who is ‘her?’”

that’s not important. do you want me to tell the story or not?

“whatever…”

anyways. as we strolled down sixth avenue i-

“i thought it was fifth avenue?”

Can you not?

“sorry….”

as we strolled down whatever the **** avenue it was, i couldn’t tell my feet from the concrete because the street lamps tinged everything an odd warm shade of brownish orange.
to stop myself from falling i reached out and wrapped my arm around your shoulder. 

I can still feel the fur from your coat brushing on my cheek.
you didn’t protest, and i sure as hell wasn’t going to stop.
we were drunk. and talking. 
talking about nonsense, about school, about our grades, about boys… 
it’s funny that if we talked for long enough, without a doubt, our conversation would drift to the subject of love.

You knew that I liked you. back then i thought you just liked to torture me. 

we stopped at the burning open palm of the street light before us. 
i stopped you mid-sentence. 
‘i could love you better’.

after those five words left my lips i suddenly wasn’t very drunk anymore.
 
silence. 

there was no turning back now,  so i had to just roll with it. 

‘you waste all of this time on these boys who do nothing but hurt you…. but i’ve loved you for years now. you and i both know that you deserve better. that i would be better. every single time you come up in conversation with my old friends or my parents they ask whether or not we’ve finally gotten together or not. what’s stopping us?’

You stared at me for a long time, saying nothing, but it didn’t take a psychic to see the indecisiveness and longing and anxiety and fear swirling inside of you like your unmentionables in your Maytag.


“I guess i don’t really have a good reason. it’s just…. awkward, you know?” 

She paused. I tried not to betray any emotion with my face. 

"I'll cut you a deal. if in two years, we aren't seeing anybody... we'll give 'us' a shot." 

Not quite the answer I was looking for, but it was better than a flat out 'No'. little did I know at the time that they were essentially the same thing. 

I stuck out my pinky finger.

'Pinky promise?'
"Pinky promise”, she replied.

We locked eyes, locked pinkies in an embrace, and seconds later the ghostly white of the pedestrian walk signal shone down on us. 

We broke our gaze and walked off into the night.

That was three years ago, and it’s probably safe to say that we won’t be taking that shot.
I don’t hold it against her. But i learned through three years of waiting not to make promises that you can’t or don’t intend to keep.

The shards of light came to rest on the skyline while the beast screamed, restlessly, vying for the last scrap of validity.
      Entwined limbs presided over eternal nights, a disregard for the din.
           This was happiness.

So I willingly followed you again past Hades shadow into perdition and watched you wake.
     Time faltered as we watched the righteous misunderstand the sentient. Running from their volatile citadels.
            Love was marked as our mistress, we were bound by the strength of restless endeavors, feeding off our solicitation of conscious.
                   As we consumed, no one understood that it was our tether to the old world, and so there was release, with no regret

I am not your Romeo
and you are not my ******* Juliet
and yet
we are still kept apart
by miles and years
and no amount of wasted tears will ever
change the fact that
I am not your Romeo
and you are not my ******* Juliet.
This is not a fairytale,
there is no happy ending
and I am sick and tired of sending
prayers up to a god
that doesn't care
or doesn't even exist.
I am not your Romeo
and you are not my ******* Juliet.
this is the
seventh
time that fate has felt like
dangling a beautiful soul
in front of my face yet out of my grasp
(I keep count because I'm a bit of a *******)
and I'm not sure how much longer I want to keep playing this game.
but don't
worry your pretty little head baby I'll
be around until you're done with me.
I'll be yours until you decide to
move on and become just another number on my list
and sweet memories I wish I could forget because
I am not your Romeo
and you are not my ******* Juliet.

the year is two thousand and fourteen and something isn't right

maybe it's related to the fact that there is no more history on the history channel

and the only thing the discovery channel wants to investigate
is the depth of our bank accounts

the word 'integrity' has become archaic. obsolete. unnecessary, simply, because nobody has any anymore.

whatever happened to learning for the sake of learning?

who was the sick greedy ******* who decided that it was okay to charge money for knowledge?

our youth are being put into ******* for the knowledge necessary to survive in this society

of inequality.

in the 21st century slaves toil away in classroom as well as coal mines.

and those who dare to resist the path of post-modern peonage laid before them are doomed to a life of minimum wage mundanity or constant criminal risk.

there is something to be said about the quality of our reality if we are constantly seeking mind altering substances to escape it.

i too have become a slave. and a large portion of those who read this message have as well.

our souls signed away at the dotted line, sealed within great paper phylacteries adorned with the sinister sigils of Sallie Mae.

the chains of our debt will never let go of us. even upon death our progeny will have to hoist our burdens on their shoulders.

and for those of you who know not of our *******, i bid you welcome, like a Brother greater than I once said:

"welcome to the united snakes, land of the thief, and home of the slave. the grand imperial guard, where the dollar is sacred and power is god."

if your total net worth rests below a cool few million i suggest you stay away.

silly me. silly me, silly me, silly me. after all this country was built on generation after generation of genocide, **** and fraud, codified into the laws we hold so tight and so high, how naive was i to even expect civil discourse and equality from a naturally sinister state?

cloaked in the fog of pure ignorance we the people paradoxically bear the weight of our fraudulent federal government on our backs while simultaneously parasitically depend upon it.

parapets and gaudy domiciles all built with the blood sweat and tears of the disenfranchised. soft music composed of the screams of children dying from predator drone hellfire missiles lilts through the hallways.

news flash: the illuminati and the reptilian overlords are not trying to control your mind.

this is not about pineal gland calcification and third eyes but about the systematic disenfranchisement and subjugation of every man woman and child in this unfortunate nation.

they impose harsh sentences on small time drug crimes and outsource our only sources of economic stability.
left with no upward mobility, we then resort to any means necessary to simply survive.

'the world is your oyster.' they say. and they conveniently fail to mention the fine print which emphatically states that you may only possess the oyster shucking knife if you are white, male, and upper middle class.

this is not about checking privilege and white guilt. this is about the way that this ****** up world works. about the sinister cogs turning behind the scenes.

and if you dare raise your voice in resistance you'll find yourself staring at cinderblock walls, spools of barbed wire, reinforced steel bars, and armed guards for the rest of your sad life. your enclosed inmate existence making the coffers of the prison-industrial complex even deeper.

some say we should raise our fists instead and fight. and i say to them good luck fight the world's most technologically advanced military in its own home territory. Guerilla warfare and armed millitias stand about as good of a chance and gorillas armed with sticks and stones when the enemy possesses satellites that can see your face from orbit.

and i hope you don't mine being despised by the public of the modern world when you're slapped in the face with that dreadful catch-all term that is 'terrorist'.

but we can't just sit here and let the vines of greed asphyxiate our vitality away.

so herein lies the eternal question that i pose to you:

what are we to do?