I read Stephen King like the bible, find a reason to live in the cigarette smoke that screens between my eyes and night skylines, pretend to hate holding hands, and keep conversations at a distance by looking down. I put my sadness in gum wrappers and leave them in the bottom of my pocket just in case I need to write a poem about a person who used to love me. I order my coffee sweet so when someone asks for a sip, they enjoy it. Keep my face bare on purpose so people will really see me, leave my hair a mess so they’ll really know me.
And amid everything that I am I have never enjoyed spending days with myself. The dark in me is a rude guest that drinks all your wine and asks to crash on your couch. It asks for a cigarette when you’re on your way to work and only have one left. It lays next to you all night and keeps its eyes open until it sees the sun, snoozes ten alarms, and then screams at you for not waking it up.
And what I worry is that you will see the insides of the person I am. You will reel at the times I smoke instead of sleep, choke on the black coffee I make when I’m alone, call my inability to hope a deal breaker, and cringe as if the broken spines of my multiple copies of The Shining are your own bones.
Last night, you held my head in your hands so it couldn’t shake, smoothed my hair down, and called me perfect. And all I can hope is that you change your definition of the word before you realize I’m not.
Love is a construct, but when really you feel it, it holds like a fire in the palms of your hands and burns away any sensation that isn’t them.
And the fire spreads; it makes smoke of eyes, charcoal of voice, and ember of heart; a slow and methodic ignition of molecules that pumps your breathing as a kind of oxygen gasoline.
And when it’s lit the last piece of you, the door to your bedroom gets closed with an ignorance about your cindered sheets.
And its leaving makes the handle too hot, and you may be ashes with no hope but it also lit the curtains, and no one can get to you because everyone’s scared your skin will blend with their fingers like sand into water.
When you get melted by a flame like this, the extinguishing is not a relief. It is an agony of entrapment in your bedroom of a body, with an absence that coats you in ash and won’t let you feel.
You ask in amber what makes me want to leave here, this world. A question that wraps your fingers around my wrist like you can handcuff me to an answer you can work with.
I whisper in washed out Wednesdays that sometimes my heart and everything that’s supposed to keep me in this body tries to oppose the earth’s axis in a way that feels like my insides need to get outside my skin.
You answer in a silent russet and I watch my emptiness metastasize from your hands to the part of your eyes where you realize pain, and I hear the reserve of your voice drain.
And I don’t know how to take away your fear because I haven’t yet grasped if my lungs want to feel the cold of snow beyond my breath or if my throat just wants to scream at God without my help. But either way it hurts.
The stars take acid at noon in a classroom and tell the moon: “why do we have to shine all the time? When are we going to use this in our real life?”
The moon answers with red, swirling to the edges of the classroom and says: “you don’t always get to do what you want when you have people that look up to you.”
You see the stars took acid as teenagers, before the world could even see them.
They still had time for suicide but they put chemicals on their tongues and played with the insane idea that they inhabited planet earth.
The come up dimmed their shine and they asked: “why can’t it be like this all the time?”
They don’t want futures to fulfill; they want to be invisible.
The stars get tired of giving good advice and deciding fates for people who are never as alone as they think they are.
When the stars come down from taking acid they consider falling, at least then someone would wish for them.