Your footsteps linger on my floorboards, and I could make this a metaphor, but it’s been a long couple years
and I am tired.
There’s no poetry in love, anyway.
You jump from the balcony, and I am just selfish enough
To wish it had been me, instead, to drag you inside.
I’m sorry for the empty bottles of spray paint
And the fact that I could never get your eyes right.
The house groans when you pass it by-
I’ll give you my jacket, instead, brush away the dust,
Paint your eyes, gold in the sunlight,
the last of my dead in the frozen yard.
I’m not your boy anymore.
There’s blood on the ground and I don’t feel like being selfless, but I guess
This is just the tables turning.
Just have some mercy,
Come back.
The choir is singing a church hymn- they cover the rot up in roses,
And if there is a hell, I know where to find you.
I’ve wracked up enough sins.
Anyway, sorry for the distance.
Your eyes coil around me like the phone cord, unanswered calls, lingering under awnings,
Part of me is tempted
To do something drastic.
I’m in the yard again, slicing through roots,
Breaking the ground over and over,
Because I would rather remember a wound
Then lose another piece of grief.
I hope that your party isn’t as loud as mine-
I still remember how you hate noise. I hope
That somewhere, there’s a quiet room up the stairs of a stranger’s house
A bathroom, an empty bedroom
Where the moonlight flows in.
Here. It’s 2013
And you are telling me that you’ll live forever
And for the last time,
I believe it.
Sorry for using up the paper. Sorry for making you read this.
It’s another pointless tragedy, the asteroid,
But no one can name all the stars, anyway.
In the morning, when they find your corpse, I will see your collarbone and
I’ve decided I’d rather carry it.
I’ll write you in the margins, because it’s all I have,
I can’t turn flesh into poetry.
Afterwards I’ll think about us, back alleyway prayers and cigarette smoke.
If I really want to break my own heart,
It’ll have to be ugly,
I’ll have to say it.
I love you.
There is no poetry, brown eyes.
I love you.
