cancer crushed the cornerstore front where i was soft selling my wares to those who would stop long enough to understand the value of worlds that would emerge from words they heard dripping with hyped to high-heaven hyperbolic terms, a pitch to catch every dime store dip-shit who couldn’t discern between integrity and the incessant need to flatter ourselves in the dark imagining that she would actually come home with us

or him home with me

you home with he

we don’t come home

i wasn’t so disillusioned

understanding fever pitch i walked away before the switch would kill the last necessary need to continue to feed the balancing half of this distraction

it was destruction

disappointed that you kept defending their right to feed at the same trough as the ones who gave you this cloth, stained with the way you trained them to listen when nobody else would come

a disease

innocuously took the heat for you

the lie for him

the life from them

why did you tell me you were born in July

I was at that store

when your mom, on your birthday, left you in the falling snow