What purpose but LOVE stirs the soul?
Waking, working, sleeping, thinking, living, dying, all are physical acts, we are slaves to our own instinct until love makes us forget looming fatality and escape the constrictions of these cyclical patterns. If nothing happens when we die, at least I loved you.
At least I felt your breath and skin and alive in your eyes. At least we touched, at least we fought, at least we cried and screamed and bled and begged and held onto each other like we could stop the world from spinning. At least hitting you made me feel relieved and guilty and so many feelings I’m glad I felt.
I’m a loiterer in this world, lingering in the corners and crevices, holding onto hopeless memories haunting me like your shadow never left like you did. Like you didn’t pack it with your dresser and your spices.
He stayed and cast himself upon me like an apparition trapped in the corner of my eye, lurking me my whole life in every situation, in every bed it hovers me until I sleep it suffocated my dreams with nightly terrors of my regrets replayed on a loop in my tortured mind with metal surround sound and REM HD and when I wake up
Every
Morning
Feels like the very next day

My dear, how dare you
You can get to me, but I can’t get to you.
Two lit windows in a sordid building off the main road in a parking space with no intention of getting out but blocking the other cars isn’t neighborly and getting out crosses the line.
The lines on your face from years of getting what you want and just having it blow up in your face. I bet you do this with all the girls, those girls you told me about that you used to love, used to be married to
I won’t break up a family, I won’t be that girl, I cried the whole way to Chicago because I knew sitting next to you in the secret coffee house would be the closest I’d ever get to being held by you in way I never thought I could be held before, big hands, warm chest, I’d touch your hair the way we all want our heads to be stroked.
Don’t make me that girl, you’ll never love that girl, you’ll keep waiting for her to cross another no trespassing sign.

Oh my dear

She’s not an artist, she’s the girl who dates artists, hanging out in coffee shops and gallery openings and graffiti alleys waiting to pick up the next brooding creative type just to end up making him take her to the mall
She’s not an artist, though I’m sure she’s suffered with affair after affair with depressed narcissists
Dyed hair and damaged, that’s how you like them. When she leaves she becomes poetry and paintings and someone else’s work the only legacy she can leave behind someone else’s muse som actual artist’s grieving exultation
She’s not an artist and she doesn’t want to be. Who would want to be burdened with the destiny of creating what other people feel of building what does not exist, of decoding the extremes of human emotion into palatable expression for others to criticize and empathize and characterize in textbooks and classrooms and elite discussions and other meetings of snobbery
Oh yes, he fought her all the way home

I never thought, one day, I would not remember and not have you to ask exactly how it went, how it happened again
How you saw me – somewhere – I can’t remember
And you called me for a ride home
And you were at a party across the street from the apartment we briefly shared
Until I did the worst thing you can do to someone you love, and I found myself doing it with you to someone else I loved, answering your call in the middle of the night, picking you up so late that it was bright by the time we got to your mom’s house and she was out of town so I came in and you made me breakfast and I sat at your table, the dog at my feet, and you tinkered around in the kitchen and the cat skulked across the cold tile floor and the fresh dawn light made it all very clear how nice things could have been and how nice they would never be.

Who slayed Achilles?
How did you get down to the heel so fast? I felt like there was so much more body to go through, so much more discovery ahead, a long journey of pleasant scenery and secret passageways but we’re there already. YOu slidced my tendon and left me for dead, unable to walk away or follow you or do anything but stay, strangled with vicious words, callous actions, a few raging rants that left me in tears in hopeless confusion that the man I so adore can morph into such an animal, fangs and claws and patches of fur with moldy wounds between battle scars of past lives, past fights
Last night – you called and spoke to me so sweetly and within a day you rip me to shreds, starting with that mortal tear to that vial muscle rendering me useless unable to fight fair or steer clear of your instigation wave your sign, preach your line, you don’t get to decide when I’ve had enough

This year is going to be the year
Or maybe it’s next year
Or maybe it was last year
Or maybe there’s no arbitrary endpoints between the years and we’re all just winding down and there haven’t been years with you and years without you
Are you kissing someone at midnight?
A guy like you, of course you are.
I’ll be drowning in my own delusion
And of course cheap champagne
And typing in your number but deciding not to call and counting the years gone and predicting the years left and determining the turning point where it all went wrong but if they’re all just random points on a dead man’s old map
Maybe i’ve been bad all along

My dear,
Can you feel our future?
You don’t want a future with anyone you just want to fall in love your whole life
And why not?
New touching, holding, kissing, the excitement of that first time legs opening, eyes widening
Why not
‘Stay up all night getting to know you instead of staying all night trying to sleep next to you again even though I’m sick of your breath your look, how you always get too drunk and break my glasses in the kitchen sink and how it used to be magnetic not forced like a chore, like an obligatory duty to keep you drained and not wandering not dreaming about the girl at the office who dresses like a slut and she knows it trying to get you to look at her, but you don’t want her either you just want to tell her enough stories to get a first kiss and if that’s good maybe more
You don’t pay whores for sex, you pay them to leave.

I’m going to put your pieces in the gun safe
Your letters, your cards, your notes, your scraps, your purple plaid peacoat, your shorts the cat peed on, your heartfelt crafts and artifacts,
That one bottle we drank and you saved and replaced the champagne with silk sunflowers
I’m going to spin the dial and forget the combination and carry it over my shoulder through the falling dusk, into the nights, into the woods, to an unmarked grave where I’ll bury our love, our years, our moments, when you made my life worth living and the sun stayed out logner and I never ate alone in front of the TV with nothing on
And they’ll find our love in 100 years or 1,000 years or far enough away so that it looks like a beautiful story, a time capsule of a fragment of our lives and hopefully not in just 10 years when we’re both still miserably alive, hating each other, proving your wildest dreams untrue.

I wish gravestones had mailboxes
It just makes sense, then I could tell you what you missed, what I did, how I fucked my life up all over again
And some spiritual messenger would take my letter up to the clouds
That’s where you go right?
The actual opposite of where we put you?
Suffocating beneath the dirt
Eroding into the environment
Melting back into the neglected earth
For future generations to abuse and destroy
How hopeful a future
With mounds of dirt
And no correspondence

I had a dream you got engaged at a McDonald’s in Paris.
And the ring was Yves St. Laurent (even though I don’t think he makes jewelry)
And you hadn’t meant to ask at Le MCDo
But the two of you stopped to get a Royale with cheese or whatever
And she saw the box sticking out of your bag
And you couldn’t wait and just asked her right there and thought
“What a funny story this will make for the newspaper announcement.”