This October,
My thoughts
Are brittle as snow
And not nebulous.
This October,
All I need
Is to not be me.
This October,
I want to be forgotten
Rather than be known
You are an out-of-season flower
And you keep asking everyone
If they identify with Kierkegaard’s
Either//Or.
Snow,
A drive-in,
Soft glowing street lamps,
Softer lips,
Abrasions to the lips and jaw,
Sharing a Mortlach in a freight train yard.
I am no longer screaming
To portend the inevitable anymore.
All the gas station rum
flowing through my blood,
Is twisting my stomach into knots.
I am no longer waiting
For God.
Even though God
Has always been here
Everywhere and in every instance
Where I have suffered,
God would not be so kind
To intervene in suffering
He had a direct hand in effectuating.
I have never concerned myself with divinity.
Lofty concerns, as such,
stay on the rim of the eyes
Of virtuoso and priests.
I have only known this existence,
And have only cared for you.
I don’t know how to start this,
All I hope for is
Nobody else relates to these
Words I have written for you.
I am writing this at six am in the morning At the back of a nearly expired milk carton. Of late, it has dawned on me how I never got to ask you Why do you hate that patient in ward 5088 so much? Or what the view from your window is Whether a run-down bridge Or a fluorescent mulberry-lit store that Only sells maps of Cincinnati With brown borders Like the colour of your eyes.
It’s 2000 again It’s the dawn of the new millennium From the dawn of a new world To the end of one world And the birth of another. As I sit in an airport Watching everyone move in a transitory state, I’m leaving so many things behind, But I’m going someplace new.
You as a transient dream, not lasting, unbeknownst to me, Asking me how long it has taken for me to get here I’m hesitant to tell you how I had to make A bargain or how I had to pawn off My light brick radio that only played Velvet Underground To afford a kayak to get to where you are.
Right now, it’s too early in June For the runaways to feel this akin To waiting for moments That never ended up happening. And it’s too deep in the morning To look in the mirror and find A past version of me that Only ever wanted to be a runaway. I wanted you to be the last thing on my mind As I watched skylights burning holes in the night sky Or rain on light rail windows,
So I have decided to leave you.
With a bell jar filled with poorly represented feelings.
And an inquiry into the nature of our kind of pain
Will reveal
You’ve built your world with such perfect pieces that
I’ve now made peace with the fact
The constant repetitive ringing Inside of my head has heightened so much that I can’t distinguish anymore between the incidents of the past or the present.
I have conjured all of my misplaced guilt and enclosed it in satin Armour wrapped around 19th-century mysticism. The armour, now ruptured, reeks of repugnancy all throughout. I have taken all my Rationalizations and stamped them all over my egotistical whims,
Velouria, an amnesiac, constantly on 18 mg of Percocet and LSD, believes that the world at its core is merely symbolic. She dreams of a new resurgent world, born out of a casualty of an era, where everyone wakes up
There are other ways for people to fall apart that don’t end up with your father killing himself. And decades later somewhere in Munich, a woman leaves a hundred angry voice mails and starts to hypothesise about how self-inflicted abuse is just a desperate annotation of self-love.
We have over-romanticized the idea of intimacy so much that I cannot tell you any more how I am going to apply for a plea of release from all your held up resentments, your frequent disorientation, and the constant exhaustion caused by pandering to your fantasies of how you will someday read Immanuel Kant and save humanity…
When you laughed and said that all of Kodaline’s songs are hopeless and people cannot save us I didn’t think about how I have choked on every opportunity at love And drowned countless plants in the names of those who have left,
In a less politically charged world, globalization did not gulp my father’s apology for never being there, and my mother’s antique store never sold hemlock dining tables or vinyl records of laughter and forgetting and she never contemplated her abonnement issues through absurd questions like how many apologies does it take to buy someone’s sympathy.
In a desperate attempt To get you to listen, I whisper your name in three distinctive pitches. Instead, you choose to reply in the passive voice and wrongly put full stops. So, I keep whispering why a body reeking of forgotten poems will never be a proper metaphor for love. You do not ask why, So I don’t tell. Instead, in a different metaphor On someone else’s skin, Two young lovers dance slowly, to Skinny Love. Over a battlefield with scattered polaroids and flowers. Where you weave portraits of fragile men drowning in Madonna’s eyes,
Look by now I have spent all my money, On sending angry voice recordings Of “Letters to Milena” to someone now dead.
Your lover spends the majority of his afternoons thinking of cemeteries, and how you said thinking about people through scotch bottles will turn their memories purple. Your lover, now a bartender, serves disfigured Glen Fiddich bottles and believes intangible things like feelings still grow on trees; and often asks irrelevant questions like how does one love a woman like you,