this might hurt.

You vex me.

You dredge up the past in some simplistic statement and suck me in, spiral down into webpages for a sign of your name, keywords and it's all spina bifida foundation and space: here's to me for remembering how you feel about asteroids and inside jokes.
You remain frustratingly relevant in a world I've built without you, and what I can't fully erase I intend to suppress; a flaming foot stomp on the fuck you I've sent your way so many times.


Fuck you for being interesting. and mysterious. And for sending messages like that, when I find it months later, myself, caught red handed ripping up the past again. At least I know you do, too.

Is there a future? I so enjoy your company. But you always want from me something I cannot give. I feel it, it pulls. Into bad dreams where I wake up shivering, scared, and think, if you were a good man, a really good man, why did I find you there?

Want can pull a man to madness, don't you agree?

this human thing.

When you're barely holding it together, the littlest things can set you off. One thing goes wrong and it' down the rabbit hole again, and you're crying but it's got nothing to do with the trigger. The bullet wound was already there.
I'm not supposed to talk about it. Worst it's embarrassing. Who wants to see a person crumble like this. People don't understand. Today it was a grade, a shitty grade apparently for all the shitty work I've been putting out there. Why are you crying over a grade? It's not the grade. It's the cherry on top of a whole lot of raw emotions. I hate to admit it
but,
I'm more fragile than I thought. I don't know if strong people reach out, but I hide, and the more I hide I go unnoticed, something scattered like a stack of paper that blows away, page by page into the wind. There's a very real part of me that wants to disappear, to melt under the sun and evaporate. Be reborn as mist or wind or a fleeting raindrop and just take the fucking ride...People don't want to hear that. I don't want to say that. So I bring bird feathers back to a damn picture frame and realize my life was build on a house of sticks. One stone and the place falls down.

little one.

LC. My little elsie girl.
Here lies grief, a stubborn old seat in a game of musical chairs, nowhere else to turn. Have I failed you in some way? Reason and emotion argue a tempest inside of me that rages, trying to turn back the clock with its centrifical force. But here I still am, standing still in a world that keeps moving forward. The awkward I'm Sorry's, and mumbled it's okay's. It's old, and I'm tired of it. Like maybe I could just quit and go spend some time catching up to you. Come back to me. I love you. I'm not strong or resilient, I'm not functional. I want to die a happy child in a sea of cats and dogs and horses for family. No good at growing older. Where does your journey take you.
Today you came home in a box and i thought only a year and a half ago you came home on that same passenger seat. If I could change things for you I would. And not to save myself but because you deserved better. You deserved longer. I'm skin and bones and the echoes of the same thoughts that bounce and rebound over the same issues. Grief, the only chair left when your time is up.

All the words in the world don't change the simple fact that you were a cat, and I was a better human with you here.

sampson.

what if I was the one who would have ruined you? It was I who loved you first.

stray.

Like them, I'm a stray. Sniffing garbage cans for scraps and wandering place to place with a smile. Settling for the stripped off bits, your unwanted pieces are my prize. But home is where you are now, and I'm loyal as a dog.

i am jack's festering guilt.

No matter what I've said, it will never be okay. And I've tried getting older but time is blind and the words I find are merely echoes of each other...raising circles on my palms. Still counting, 5 years, your name in the searchbar. Looking for just a clue. The last bits of 2009 strewn about in this head of mine, but the bar blinks back, silent as the dead. I am Jack's festering guilt.

The night you don't remember

I can't stop thinking of your hands, lingering around my waist and drawing wanting patterns...and these shivers echoing through my core. Oh chemical feeling, and this undeniability. And words in my voice said "Just hold me." Who was that?
You say you'll always be trying to kiss me. Just once, if there is nothing there, we will go our separate ways. No, I say. It won't be like that. You say exactly.

How long now? Cemented to your porch, and fear. You lay beside and wrapped yourself around me, I asked, who are you? Because suddenly I do not know. Our conversation is frank and clear, honesty corralled into one tiny night and you're calling me out for never having the courage of honesty before now. We both messed up. And ache, like a hazy blanket over my heart. My chest is a cloud I'm only floating on. This girl I loved, you say. Loved? I reply. I love you, you say. I love you. I messed up. 
You should have married me. I know, you say. I know that now.

Our hands somehow flit in finite spaces and it's this magnetic atomic exchange. I say hold out your hand, marry me. You tell me you don't have a ring, and I slip the rounded rope of a dog leash over your ring finger. Now you can't ever say you've never been married. 

He tells you how lucky you are. This man walking down the road says I'm beautiful and how lucky you are. You say I'm such an idiot. It's abundantly clear. And I never want you to stop touching me. And it's mine, all mine, this memory; it's surreal and it aches, like nostalgia and whiskey and laughter and loyalty. I never knew you loved me. I thought, but I never knew. You should have married me, you idiot. We would be infinitely happy now. We would smile and we would fall, because at last, at last, the emptiness would be gone. And now nothing will ever be the same. So we exist in foggy memories and haphazard meetings and we'll never get away from each other. And something about that will always, always, always. hurt.