Stumble

I meet you there and enjoy a few sweet minutes as we sit draped and entwined and I condense into, finally, a real person, concrete and heavy, and I bask in the luminous lucidity that has found me at last... but then you shove cheaply off and drag me away and up and out and down with you and everything that I am evaporates and my reality fades out like the words you wrote so lovingly in the sand when we were seagulls and danced in the razor-blade grass, not caring about the cuts ringing our calves or the bruises blooming aubergine and aquamarine on our bare sun-baked thighs. I ran away from you on a train in the darkness, and as we roared through the night I laughed to be so free of you, but I disembarked on a minefield hung with glittering spun-sugar lights and clouds of chlorine gas over a deceitful marsh of creme brulee and sofa cushions. You lied to me, to all of us, and then slowly slid your shining knife between my ribs, smiling sweetly all the time, and when you shower me with your false concern I will laugh in your face like the madman I am so surely becoming. You don't even notice, you just think I'm laughing at some stupid joke, or just for the thrill and the joy of being alive, you've never been able to tell when I hate you. Maybe you just think I'm as blind as you are, that I don't see your hands, enticing behind your back, as you stand far too close for innocence and lie with your smiling hopeful eyes at us for fear of losing the people you say you love the most. Pray to whatever you hold dear, darling, because every day you're pushing harder, testing the sinews that we've got tied around our swollen ankles, and they won't hold much longer, I'm warning you; your horrible mistakes, your greed, your complaints, your utter disregard for what anyine else wants or needs, your incredible, mindboggling inability to understand how anyone but yourself is feeling have set off an apocolyptic collection of alarms-- the flashing lights and air-raid wails have got everyone else hiding terrified underground, wrapped in itching blankets with their eyes tightly shut, but you don't notice a thing as you stand on your alabastor pedestal and tell yourself you are raining benevolance upon us, the unwashed masses, but we just shake our heads as we open our umbrellas against your acid, and slowly walk away from your philistine face turned in rapture toward the sun. I leap down and sail on a moth's painted wings across the blueberry sky to settle in your virtual arms even as they fade away and I am left to stare blankly at a cold and unresponding emptiness where I long to see your love flash before me so I can forgive my unresponsiveness and the way I faded away from your linked arms and onto the train in the night. I ramble rumblingly on as my head splits open and forces my body into the sleep of the terminally passive-agressive overthinking psychotic pansy.

Sealed

What the hell was I thinking?
You weren't, that's for god-damned sure.
I always come back to you
I don't know why
It always ends with me hating you again
Our relationship wanes
And I can no longer wax poetic
Eloquence is lost to me now
No pretty words flow out to describe this
This is something entirely new
A new brand of emotion
Cutting deep
Dark and caustic
As you keep ripping out the scar tissue.
Good thing I'm good with cover-up
And you're all but blind
Your eyes stitched shut
With hypnotic chemicals.
You plead, say you love her.
Prove it.
I can't believe you.
Not anymore.
I don't even trust myself
To look you in your saccharin eyes
Without losing control of my tightly-wound temper.
You're scared of losing us
You should be.
You're so goddamned lucky
That we've got heads like plateaus
That we know it's not worth this...
This alkaline burn
It'll heal
We've both got scars already.
But I still can't comprehend
How your mind works
Is it clockwork?
Have you ever read between lines
Or paused
Just
Waited
One
More
Moment
In consideration, contemplation
Of what could happen?
Weighed worths balanced by the world on your shoulders?
But your atlas is much too restricted
So you're not conflicted
Just looking back, regretful
As you finally realize
Oh, shit, this'll hurt
This could...
This could break.
And as my eyes are forced
Wider and wider
Squint as I might
Every inch gained
Pushes me right back to the beginning
Overcoming every frantic attempt
To accept
Forgive
At the very least, forget.
But it's so much worse than even I thought
Despite my mind's delirious hyperbole.
The tiny light in the center of my brain
That holds my trust in you
Every day I try to make it grow
But with every inch gained
It dwindles more and more
And despite all your pleading words
You seem determined to snuff it out completely.
Isolation can only do so much
I have to confront this sometime
But every time I try...
Every determined ounce of steeled nerves run screaming
From your laughing eyes and playful hands
And I smile and fold
Just like always.