(letting go)

hey tantrum boy.

i’ve seen your loss
it was hiding in the same place
brooding like you
crouched in the corner behind all the other things you pretend aren’t yours
the dirty thoughts
the voiceless needs
the unanswered letters to a compassionless god next to the
empty cartons you hoped to someday fill with lofty dreams

i can understand.

you could not save your mother
i could not save my father

we are both failed
failed failures flailing
in a still bottomless sea
but it has a nice ring to it doesn’t it?

comforting more than anything
like eyes that bleed at will
a gangrened hole in the heart
or a fantasized bullet to the head

it's so much safer to see yourself as broken
so the world will think there’s nothing left to break
grinding away the afternoons
assigning every fragment a personalized adjective

hideous
diseased
unloved
unloving

like items in a morbid warehouse
called out one by one
to be savored with a tongue of delighted pity

i’ve been keeping your smile for you inside my left pocket
folded into the pages she wrote about
her bleeding insides that she didn’t know you’d read

and the ticket to the movie you went to see the afternoon she died
when all you wanted was to cry inside a dark empty womb where
shadows might keep the thoughts at bay
but the fat guy in the corner kept laughing at all the wrong jokes in
all the wrong places and ruined the whole damn experience for you

it seemed too fragile to throw away

and someday when you realize how you’ve been missing it
you can have it back

and someday when you realize what you want from me….

if you sleep i can keep watch
i’ll pick up my pieces beside you and try to put this whole story together

when it rained
who to blame
why this whole damn place came crumbling down and
left the children without a soul to their name
stranded in the middle of a dry desert landscape
whipping up its own brand of nightmare

and when it’s time
when we can look back at all of this and laugh over ice teas in frosted glasses

when you can put your arms around me without feeling so lonely that
you would die just to be alone
so terrified to look into someone else’s eyes for fear of what they might reflect

you can tell me why it is
and whose fault it is
that nothing
ever
stays in one place forever.