caress the images i left behind

it may be the last time you feel free enough to engage with me

i didn’t want to leave… where we started

an endless first kiss tongue dance with no hands

lost in brain chemistry and other people’s poetry, songs that broke time barriers as winter blankets steadied the shiver between a floor-heater’s cycles and our rising and falling blood pounding excursions into flesh felt thank you’s and one day i do’s

we couldn’t have known

it would have upended the trial by smile we shared when you asked if loneliness made me scared

i didn’t like the way you yelled

i remember thinking as you felt compelled to uncover your red face over a roommates propensity to use your curling iron

i’m thinking too much now

caught up in how this sounds

early months and years i was drinking too much you stayed in touch knowing there was, maybe, something redeeming with all this late night passing out after a final doubt that i missed the way it felt to be held by someone who cared enough to wrap around this drugged out heap of flesh casket bound and unleashed, friend’s, foe’s and stranger’s eyes judging the one who got naked for you, not just you, everyone in the bar night after night avoiding a fight wondering why morning coffee pissed me off and tore up my insides i couldn’t get up i fell until the next bell carried in the smell of hell in truth i must tell you i was fine all along lost in a song over and over crimson and clover they gathered around. that was the truth. they were gathering

not around me

self importance mixed with pity gives you this poetry shitting out of my head a way to communicate i’m not quite dead

actually, very much alive and thriving yet still on this coil wanting to be seen proving something to somebody every fucking day. look at me. did you see that? i wish i were more like you camouflage depressed not wanting shit from anyone. we know that’s not true i grew up a few when i put down the brew. it wasn’t even alcohol it was control. loss of it and now i rearrange the toilet paper in a woven basket by the sink and that somehow gives me more comfort than vodka and coke. where have i come? where the fuck do i go. smiling in this exhibition just hoping one of you will say. genuinely. please stay. wrapped up in me. for a little longer

please, will you judge me as if i just slit my throat?

will you ask those questions now?

why?

why would he?

how could he?

what did he do?

then i step away realizing i don’t need that, yes i do, what a waste of false desire to be self important and left trapped in another’s thoughts for that lingering moment after we leave this conversation of the mundane. yet it says what i can’t in plain clothes. just fucking leave me alone while we’re together

i want that unspoken desire to live longer.