ugha-bugha

Because I chew on promises

and stick them under polyvinyl tables:

wadded up, rose-colored fossils

to be found by wayward fingers.

We make playlists of love songs

and act out scenes from Shakespeare plays

like the worn out clichés

our adolescent selves resemble and resent.

This reeks of the peaked-in-high-school kind of cologne,

the kind that comes with varsity sweatpants

and too-long lanyards 

and I tell you, “I’m flammable,”

(which is laughable)

because with every growl,

I grow more alight.

With every grunt, I feel more alive.

You say I just want you for sex

but say, there’s more than that.

When I finger your belt loops

and clutch your collar,

I’m trying to copy and paste

your being onto mine,

trying to delete what was there

and replace it with what I find.

How many poems will I write you

before I read you one?

How many songs will remind me of you

until I send you some?

In my mind, we’re high society,

shaking hands and kissing babies 

like you boasted.

In my mind, I’m your stoic sidekick

in a charcoal gray blazer and slingback heels

with my head on your shoulder

The outline of a lion’s resting flank

hovers between city and sky

while marigold pools of early morning light

envelop your skin and that gentle grin

that is not so gentle, 

like your hand in the pocket of my denim cut-offs

curled around the curve of my haunches

and herding me home.

I have waited for a ferociousness like this,

this solemn voracity, 

quiet as a kitten’s weepy snore

but thunderous in latitude, epic in magnitude;

are you my Zeus? Harking back to doodles

in the margins of handouts,

held hostage in this adolescent limbo,

I am nostalgic for the now

spell out I-m-i-s-s-y-o-u, like an alphabet soup

and I’m drowning in it, letters gather at my lips

like lint on linen. 

Even the lines around my eyes

spell out I-n-e-e-d-y-o-u, vision blurring at the seams

and soiled by streams of salt,

like a spoiled preschooler, I cry at my own cruelty.

When you took me in

I fell into a trap of my own making.

Its incisors tear apart my limbs 

When I fold this letter up and in and seal the envelope, 

it will be crisp and swift and good

but when it gets to you, a thousand wrinkles will unravel from your thumb prints

as you break through the top and unwrap my undoing.

I am not unlike this envelope,

battered from the brief journey here

to tell you that I’m sorry, 

that you’re wrong, that I deserve another chance with your client

not because I am remorseful and healed

but because without him, I am ruined,

merely the wretched whore my predators deigned me good for.

I am not unlike this envelope,

wary and weary of the hollow promises within.

Please tell me I am worth more than a laborious goodbye text,

than a quiet blocking, than digital erasure,

even though I don’t deserve him, never did,

and certainly don’t come close now.

Please tell me I am worth trusting

even though I witnessed what trust we had

burn from both ends in the palm of my hand

as if it could be resurrected from its ashes like a mythical bird

and devour me whole.

I wrote this letter in an effort to persuade you to let him keep me

but have found no stray hopes at which to grasp. 

You pronounce me dead to him