When I was with you, I wasn’t really with you: a ghost only pretending to be fleshy and realized. Sometimes, I would wrap your arms around my waist, and stand in front of the mirror: practicing, seeing what other people saw. You never noticed that all our sheets had eyeholes cut into them.
You really weren’t someone that I knew how to love. And I really wasn’t someone that you could hold onto without losing your grip. You had your whole life painstakingly planned—like one of those world maps with little pins in all the places you have been—and I was not written into your domestic tranquility. I was all razorblades and body odor and bad haircuts and too much incense and rocky road ice-cream melting into puddles onto kitchen floors.
I was headed down the road that I thought would bring me twenty years of bleeding art and poetry spit. I found my way there without a road map; it was meant to be. You are all learning how to make benches and remodeling kitchens and pensions and payment plans and homemade pie. I am a motherfucking stormcloud, counting the seconds between thunder and lightning. Still staying awake all night.
“You may not be psychic, but your poetry is,” I whisper to myself and my candles and my pillowcase. I have a better place to write now: a three-story art deco mansion full of taxidermied bats and original mouldings, books, mold, hairless cats. I am high above the city. People say I have a great view, but I avoid windows mostly. They are full of glare and eyes and there is never enough rain.
I was written into your story for only a moment. Your story not being a love story, and mine being nothing but. Fortunately for you, you will never again have to feel that unrequited ache of loneliness muffled with stolen kisses. You were big and strong, a dinosaur of a boy, and I had you practically on-your-knees weeping.
You will never again buy chocolate-coated gummy bears (only the green, only the freshest, only milked) and wrap them in gilded tissue paper pridefully, hiding them behind your back like a little boy who has captured a frog, offering them to your princess on one knee. I wouldn’t take the bag, it had too many fingerprints on it.
You will never spend eight hours making the perfect birthday pasta sauce while your lover is off getting her fortune told by a back-alley gypsy with shovel-dug crow’s feet, and not answering her phone. When we ate that night, the sauce tasted redder than normal: a heart attack, a blood-letting.
You will never buy flowers for six months of Sundays, picking out any pink petals that might have inadvertently gotten stuck in the bouquet. Pink gave me diarrhea, you knew.
You will never stare at a girl while she is sleeping, their beauty rendering you incapable of sleep. You are a strong-willed and sleepy man, you snore goddammit.
You will never hold anyone’s hand with the ferocity and tenderness that you held mine. Very few fingers need the same sorts of affections.
These moments are my offerings to you; I’m glad that you don’t need them to survive.
You really weren’t someone that I knew how to love. And I really wasn’t someone that you could hold onto without losing your grip. You had your whole life painstakingly planned—like one of those world maps with little pins in all the places you have been—and I was not written into your domestic tranquility. I was all razorblades and body odor and bad haircuts and too much incense and rocky road ice-cream melting into puddles onto kitchen floors.
I was headed down the road that I thought would bring me twenty years of bleeding art and poetry spit. I found my way there without a road map; it was meant to be. You are all learning how to make benches and remodeling kitchens and pensions and payment plans and homemade pie. I am a motherfucking stormcloud, counting the seconds between thunder and lightning. Still staying awake all night.
“You may not be psychic, but your poetry is,” I whisper to myself and my candles and my pillowcase. I have a better place to write now: a three-story art deco mansion full of taxidermied bats and original mouldings, books, mold, hairless cats. I am high above the city. People say I have a great view, but I avoid windows mostly. They are full of glare and eyes and there is never enough rain.
I was written into your story for only a moment. Your story not being a love story, and mine being nothing but. Fortunately for you, you will never again have to feel that unrequited ache of loneliness muffled with stolen kisses. You were big and strong, a dinosaur of a boy, and I had you practically on-your-knees weeping.
You will never again buy chocolate-coated gummy bears (only the green, only the freshest, only milked) and wrap them in gilded tissue paper pridefully, hiding them behind your back like a little boy who has captured a frog, offering them to your princess on one knee. I wouldn’t take the bag, it had too many fingerprints on it.
You will never spend eight hours making the perfect birthday pasta sauce while your lover is off getting her fortune told by a back-alley gypsy with shovel-dug crow’s feet, and not answering her phone. When we ate that night, the sauce tasted redder than normal: a heart attack, a blood-letting.
You will never buy flowers for six months of Sundays, picking out any pink petals that might have inadvertently gotten stuck in the bouquet. Pink gave me diarrhea, you knew.
You will never stare at a girl while she is sleeping, their beauty rendering you incapable of sleep. You are a strong-willed and sleepy man, you snore goddammit.
You will never hold anyone’s hand with the ferocity and tenderness that you held mine. Very few fingers need the same sorts of affections.
These moments are my offerings to you; I’m glad that you don’t need them to survive.
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