I Would Leave Me If I Could: A Collection of Poetry(3)
Me as hard as She can, ’Cause I won’t love a man Unless he is angry
Because of my father.
LAYERS
Thank you
for stumbling
across the universe
with your confident swagger and tripping right into my lap.
Wild hair spilling across your eyelids and nestling into my mouth with my kiss on your forehead.
Thank you for the freckles on your nose that keep me
star-crossed,
starry-eyed,
and then cross-eyed
when I’m lying underneath you and I look up at your darling face.
You’re made of everything good in this world.
Syrup-sweet and paining my teeth dripping from my lips like honey
from the bees buzzing in my head driving me crazy, daily, with the sounds of your voice echoing through my skull and the halls of my house still ringing
from the last time you were here, the last time it was a home.
Thank you for warming the industrial gray of my concrete foundation and turning my bones
from cement blocks
to rich mahogany wood.
Layers.
INVENTORY
He told me
about the women he had slept with when we were apart.
He was honest.
And I had asked for it.
He told me stories decorated with leather and violence
and anal.
Girls
who relaxed in sweet drunken smiles and enveloped him in warmth.
Lazily tumbling through bedsheets, glowing in the acid hue of the outside lights.
Girls
who wouldn’t ask him to pick up his dirty socks.
Or turn away from him on a shared mattress.
Girls
who weren’t sad and tired.
Girls
better than me.
Who had learned to turn their trauma into adventures for him to stumble blindly through.
Instead of wallowing in their brokenness and breaking everything in their path
as penance.
BATTLES
Been biting my tongue till it bleeds
cry over things I don’t need.
My mother told me
pick your battles wisely
but you made me angry
at the world
so I chose them all.
MEMORIZE
I’m a boyish mess.
A boasting contest with an inferiority complex.
I can’t make friends.
I’ve got an eager desperation to be up on “what’s next.”
I have too much sex.
I say it’s ’cause I’m anxious and I’m
overly stressed.
I can’t take blame.
I funnel through liquor
and spit up my pain.
I’m no good with fame.
There’s a love/hate relationship with noise in my brain.
Except
for when
you speak my name.
Because you take it in vain.
(Take it in vein!) I could fall asleep here.
Crawl inside the sleeping bags under your eyes.
But I stay awake
to memorize.
STOCKHOLM SYNDROME PT. 1
I remember
how the sky looked.
Your lips made my mouth numb.
Your face
grew closer to her neck.
It’s easy to play dumb.
I remember all the chaos.
The frantic, nervous sounds.
I don’t remember much, though,
once I hit the ground.
Everything went black.
Everything got cold.
I’m standing on a sidewalk, screaming,
“Over my dead body!”
I remember tender spiderwebs.
All violet, yellow,
blue.
It seems with one eye open, still all I see is you.
I guess there was no casualty that could make you refuse.
I hide
behind a strangled mind.
You tell me, “Winners never lose.”
A hostage situation.
I know I should, but I can’t leave you
all alone
somewhere.
I know you don’t, but I still care.
This Stockholm syndrome might just be the death of me.
WISH YOU THE BEST
I hope every single day you put your socks on backward I hope you cry at night and can’t call me after I don’t hope that you’d die; just live to 75
And you spend every waking moment Wishing you felt alive.
I hope that some girl takes a picture of your sleeping body.
Wish you could go a single week and not hurt anybody.
I hope your coffee every morning is bitter and cold.
I hope you’re busy Christmas morning and you miss the snow.
I hope your team loses the finals I mean they already lost the finals But the next one
And I hope that you scratch up all of your vinyls.
Hope you drive 80 miles In your expensive car, and run out of gas
in the wild.
I hope your knees ache and your back hurts,
hope you lose your second phone or can’t remember the password.
I hope every girl unites and they decide you’re a joke But if they are anything like you then I know that they won’t ’Cause their self-esteem levels are fatally low.