I Won't Go Away

I won’t go away,

my feet are planted in soiled soot.

Last night I wanted to kill myself.

and I don’t mean that in the literal sense.

I mean,

I wanted to kill the mountain I have made

pebble

.

by

.

pebble

.

by

.

pebble

.

Since Adrienne told me

to be Yourself.

Lately I’ve wanted to kill

the cracked and crusted

psyche that yearned for intimacy and honesty,

and the smolder of eyes that realize that

maybe I am spectacular

rather than a foot-

note

to step on.

I yearned for any kind of reason to leave

bedsheets that were stained

with the wrinkles from someone who felt like remnants of a mansion in the making.

I smoke chimneys to cloud the moments

that constrict me inch by inch with nylon thoughts like "your mother left you

so we’ll nestle closer.

She abandoned you

in that Barton circle canyon but we won’t. "

Inch by inch you constrict any hope

that nooses aren't meant for wearing

as if

necklaces were meant to defy the laws of gravity.

Your mother looked you deep

in your silky spry poodle eyes

when you were five

and whispered

soldier on your best my tin soldier son.

 

But tin melts,

 

and so did I,

like the moment I looked my first lover

Roselyn

in the freckles that dot her eyes

and again the instant she ripped

her shadow from my wall

or the moment my last

let me know someone in South America

rented out the space between her legs and that

we were not only a memory

but that she had induced herself with an ounce of forget,

forgotten.

That our rooftop kisses were nothing but selfish flesh coinciding and the teardrops my eyes threw at her cotton clung tshirt that Scotland morning were

inconvenient.

People leave me like wind

runs from stormy skies.

The way fire flies give up

on your eyes one second too soon.

And this is all to say that

maybe life has left me

time

after time

after time

because I was never looking

for a lover

or a friend

or a fraternity brother,

I was looking for the umbilical chord

that writes notes in lunch boxes like

I love you son

or kisses you goodnight on your eighth birthday

or tells you that

pain is okay

and others are going to leave you

but I am going

to love you.

But

it’s hard to know what you’re looking for

when solitude drowns you

in the dark

recesses of a china doll

aching for someone

to come along and tell you that you are more

than the fissures that make up your broken bedside stare.

You see, that boy that battled bristle,

when Fiona and

Jordan and

Lily and

Roselyn and

Aviva

shook off their funeral lips

and breathed:

"the days we made love with our Velcro bodies

sure as fuck

wasn’t love"

,still resides between these rib cages of mine,

still knows what must lie inside

I’m still alive,

aren’t I?

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