#befitzgerald

This is honey. This is dripping. This is the bruise on my jaw. We are falling over in the shower, slipping on whiskey and spit. This is is is a miracle sent from a god I do not talk converse with anymore. My last supper was your saliva. My prayer was nothing but quite moans behind lapping waves. Monday, I woke on a boat. I woke to a dream, a man, a miracle snoring in my ear. Let’s go see the dinosaurs, darling. Let’s go see pretty lies, lover. Take me to the museum and show me your favorite skeletons. Take me to the pharmacy, I’ll show you my favorite ghosts. We we we are beating and brittle. I I I am not made to stay. Please, grab my wrists. Please, know my thoughts. I am weak and stubborn but god, your eyes sound like psalms. Your tongue kisses my teeth as though they were rosary beads. Hail Mary. Hail us. After the after, I still hear your laugh down the coast, under my door The gulls can not drown out my favorite song. We are whole and not holy. We are sin and not blessing. You are engraved in my palms. The lines deeper each day. We have always been in the crevices of my skin. Waiting. Lurking. Feeling. My feet are cold again. You sent me a picture of Lake Ontario at 9:20pm. I want to tape it on my fridge. I want to sit you at my kitchen table. I want. I need. I pray to blackholes. Ask for their magic; their escape to Kingdom. Maybe we will disappear in dust together. Maybe that houseboat was our only hope. Rock me to sleep, current. Sing me his siren song. Pull me down. Drowning is falling asleep slowly. Loving is sinking in cement shoes with open eyes.

Helen, you are not the person history books made you into. Painted incorrectly. Never portrait. Always battle. They didn't tell me you would have brown eyes or giant hands. Helen, when you were thousands of feet above me this morning I threw up the last of our remains in the toilet. Held them in my hands like dead goldfish. Tried to honor them. Thought about burying them in the backyard. Helen, you are so much better than your Twitter account had me believe. I am a bad oracle. Too sentimental. Forgive me. I  have saved every receipt from every meal we ever ate and I don't know why. Third graders eighty years from now will not care that we devoured falafel on 19th street. But I care. Too much. I am deep with it. And across this ocean I choose to write to you everyday. That is not a metaphor. You are not a metaphor or a lump in the back of my throat or someone I would ever want to introduce to my friends as merely a lover. I am the kind of man, who is not really a man, that would punch another man in the middle of a bar for you. Helen, the next great war has started inside me and the easiest thing to do would be to blame your birth but I am too too tired of clichés, even though they are mostly true. You were so deep inside of me. I have the bruises on my ass to prove it. Helen, you are so deep inside of me. Not buried but waiting. I chose to remember you because god has forgotten us. Kiss me while the subways crash into walls and husbands finally call out to their wives after years of only making eyes at the television. Helen, your love is not war. It is us moaning on top of all the dead bodies that died in your name. Fuck them all.

There is nothing mystic about a black sky. There is no comfort in  the possibility of a savior, the only calm comes from knowing. And that knowing is what  I am far too weak for.  Lately, I have only been filled with stomach acid and meantime lovers. Empty is not the right word. I am whole, certainly, just not sure what I am full with. Fuck, I am not made up of star bits or childhood giggles. I am nothing nothing nothing but the last few weeks. The different beds, the drunken love. My present is only nostalgia for wholeness; I am only the faith I have forgotten how to speak.

I hate the white lighter in your pocket. Not because of the Kurt Cobain fable. I hate it because I know it was hers. There I said it. Jealous. There I said it. Secret. There I said it. I hate picturing you two sweating, smoking, and kissing in your twin bed. My lungs are too pink for this. The past week, I've been thinking of buying a pack of cigarettes. Wouldn't touch them though. Just keep the pack in my backpack for every time you need something to light. I would offer my fingers if I could. Cut them off just to watch you smoke them down to the filter. Your lips tracing up my remains, sucking the exposed veins. If I die at 27 in a tragic, artistic, disgusting way don't let the kids make me into a myth. I set myself on fire. I burnt my own flesh. She had nothing to do with this, she is just the white lighter in your back pocket.

my heart: i miss you. even without ever having you. here in this night, i feel you. dripping down my sheets. drugged in my drink. heavy on my lids. i feel the missing you in every place i have forgotten. the back of my neck. the scar of my shin. my eighth swollen rib. you are everywhere tonight. no. that is a lie. i thought of you with my coffee order this morning. on the subway yesterday. you have been everywhere for 31 days. the gods gave me a glimpse and now i can't forget, even with the pills. your crescent is so far away from my horizon. longing is a fixed point in the distance. i miss everything we will never have.

For as long as I have known thunderstorms, I can also remember praying for a power cut. Because that meant flashlights and board games and forced family. I have not taken my medication in twelve days. I guess I have always mistaken darkness for closeness. Only ever saw hands reaching out, never asked what for. I now know your fingers were searching for a fuse. Not my face, not my lips. Meeting you was nothing but an accident, a white flash. I have not left my bed in two days. Last night, I internet searched if lightening could actually strike you dead in the shower. Not out of caution. Just curiosity. After you said it I woke, hours later, to a rumbling. I witnessed the trees bowing to something I couldn’t see. I thought I heard you singing, thought I heard you calling me. I went out, barefoot, into the rain. And waited. And waited. I still can not say your name.