Jay. (4.10.19)

It would be counterfeit

to call you a home.

You want to hold me so close

without putting a finger on my body,

as if the past strung up your paralysis

and froze your emotions in place,

catching them before they could reach you too deep

in the place you were too scared to be.

the kind of stability

fluent in all the correct tax write offs, the weekly paycheck

that doesn't look at you with barely 21 years,

boundless youth lost in stevie's vision in our minds

as if you cannot reconcile the idea

of me being anything but.

and like clockwork

the young women come and go,

telling me on the way out

I have merely been on rotation.

I know them,

the kinds of sentimental scars others can't see

that built the wall around your heart chamber

so nobody can reach inside.

men in violation,

compositions unsuccessful,

anger always turning to fury,

deprecation that knocks on every window,

medications forgotten this morning ,

plunging too deep in the art pond and the sacrifice to be able to come out,

anxious that at any moment I will lose my agency just trying to fight the current.

But that is precisely the thing.

I think about you like that water

but also like you can never settle on a choice

without falling victim to the rest that challenges it,

that fear is a risk you can’t trust yourself to take,

that you had lied through your teeth

about our evenings that could have been,

every hesitation that let me live on, hanging by a single thread in your head,

to dispose of your patterns once and for all.

I want you to run

when you want to walk,

feeling the weight of cryptic feelings

cast over boxes and boxes of memories you would not like to face,

letting them beat lethargy into the ground with your step,

strings tangling and accumulating behind your feet.

As if I can’t see how much it wears you out -

that whenever you look at me

and feel the alarms go off,

feel those hidden crates tumbling off the walls like earthquakes,

shaking the world you know to pieces,

reverberating the coldest kind of panic -

urgency must scramble to shut all your doors

and drop down your blinds

for the glory of the safe and intact.

The intuitive need

to push me away.

I hope it's fun telling your friends

who have wondered where I've gone,

“what happened to her?”

like I have been lost to the world -

and you can now safely say

she never really got under your skin

anyway.

All I can wish now

is that if not with me,

then someone else,

will remind you again why we take off sprinting,

letting the wind and the veins rush their way

with the keys to the hidden boxes -

to the safe place,

the still pond,

the being

that opens your heart

like blossoming azalea in the spring