these definitely suck and I guess they are what could be credited as a little collection of when I decided I was really interested in the structure and characteristics of common unhealthy relationships and the long-term effects. I just wanted to finally post them somewhere because I don't know what to do with them.
THE LOST BOY (The Charmer and the Charmed)
your tears were the currency
with which you bought my kisses.
it was all I could do to
keep holding your hand
as the waves battered our ship.
however,
the omniscient storm often teased us
with its apparent passing
and it was on those days that I noticed
the treasure map etched into the lines
of you palms.
purloined by abjection
was the infinite ocean that you called home;
smoke and mirrors and white caps against gray skies.
but you navigated it with such stoic finesse,
and I too often ignored
the nights when you couldn't stand up on your own--
the spirit of the sea weighed heavy on your shoulders.
a wayward expatriate of the shores
from which you had been born,
I found your measured combination of
surliness and buoyancy to be endlessly alluring.
there was always a secret ghosting your lips,
a testimony to
the tangled knots of your being
that I could never quite unravel.
I loved you
even on days when your Archipelago blue eyes
were cloudy with tempestuousness and
sea water dripped unceremoniously from your cheeks.
but you couldn't stay forever;
doomed by the tendency of your kind.
you--a despairing sailor--and I--
a fallaciously propitious lighthouse
moored on an awkward, jutting cliff--
were destined to cross paths but once
and spend the rest of our days apart,
searching for a beacon in the shades of gray
and the disillusions of the watery horizon
that will inevitably send us desperately anchoring ourselves
on some seemingly idyllic margin of land between the sea and
real life.
for now, it's bows to the great beyond.
the tide will erase my expenditure;
the saltwater becomes a catalyst for your disappearance
into the deep.
Midnight In Gotham (The Adventurers)
it's dark as hell
he's waiting for her in a desolate coffee shop, humming Midnight in Gotham
as she watches all the lies she had been telling herself scatter across her bedroom floor,
like a string of delicate pearls ripped from her
pretty neck,
or a house of cards blown over by a breeze.
and maybe it was just because the monotony of his
everyday life was broken up by the sound of her laugh
in crowded places,
or because he could never seem to turn the beautiful words
in his head into something that could be said out loud,
but for whatever reason, he could see her clearly
through the rain-soaked window pane.
his breath caught in his throat and he blinked twice
but she stayed, haunting his sheltered version of reality.
the careful architecture of his thoughts was shattered by the way
she was able to slip into the guarded radius of his sequestered world
and sleep next to him in his dreams.
the real problem was that he couldn't separate the gray-green of her eyes from the
gray-green of the ocean.
a fatal mistake to make, when you're caught in the eye of the storm.
he goes to the register and buys a coffee.
he sits at a table alone and stares at the wood grains,
wondering how he let this get so bad.
she is alone in her room, wondering how she could ever
possibly tell him.
she had hoped that her brackishness would drown him.
she hopes, still, that perhaps he'll retreat when he discovers
the looming shadows of the retaining walls
she built around herself
and graffitied with idiosyncratic pieces of poetry
and broken shards of her own soul.
because the truth is that he is her maverick
and that she half believes that his existence is a myth
because nobody could possibly
be so ethereal and not be swept away by the unforgiving tide.
the walls are conglomerate configurations of her introverted
being.
and maybe the walls will collapse at his longing gaze.
and maybe they'll fall in love
atop a heap of rubble born from the regularity of self-doubt.
but neither of them could ever know.
oh, to wage a war with such meticulous rules.
the narcissist and the healer
it is valentine’s day and
I wonder if you know this
or if you just think of it as another mundane day.
"mundane"
Did you ever think that about me?
or were all the beautiful things you said to me true
like “I am in love with you” or
"you never mattered to me".
What a funny phrase
"matter"—we are all made of more or less the same things
that stars and coral reefs and insects are made of.
we’re all the same, really, underneath our crumbling facades and yet I never meant anything to you.
but you held my hand in the art museum once
and you pointed at Starry Night and spewed random facts about Van Gogh
that of course, only you would know
and I clutched your arm and thought about The Smiths
and how the queen must be dead, somewhere
because I am holding hands with the king.
you kissed me on the forehead when we said our last goodbyes
now I have a headache there that fingers out from behind my eyes.
alone, alone, alone repeats in my head until it becomes detached from its meaning, as dull and lifeless as the
jagged pieces of the shattered yellow coffee mug that I left on the floor
because those pieces tell our story and I clutch them tightly until blood seeps from my palms.
you never played any instruments
or wrote any poetry
or even bought me flowers
but I can’t listen to music
or read a book
or walk in the park
without catching the scent of your skin in the breeze.
you spent more money on your fucking aftershave
than you ever spent on me
but I believed that when you touched my face,
when you harnessed all of the gentleness in the world and
pulled yourself out of your dark pit of vanity
and told me you needed me,
that it was all more valuable than any other form of love
that anyone else could offer.
we were the charmer and the charmed,
the narcissist and the healer,
but you never loved me.
you never even loved yourself.
you just needed someone to admire you
someone that you could promise empty promises to until the clenched fist of self-doubt that had rooted itself
deep in the very marrow of your bones was temporarily sedated.
so when we first met in that bar
and you traced a pattern with your long fingers onto the bare skin of my shoulder that seemed very much like
a treasure map to the kisses I would later leave along your jaw,
I know now that you were already empty and hollow and sad
and that you had been that way for years.
maybe you’re in that same bar tonight
tracing that same treasure map onto some other girl’s skin
hoping to feel needed or maybe hoping to feel anything.
we don’t choose who we fall in love with
but it’s a damn shame, really,
that I fell in love with you.
