A Warm Place to Self-destruct

my notebook is the name of every dude i ever wanted to fuck, slowly diminishing, turning lust-driven thinking into handwritten bullets about getting close to living with your addiction; about putting horses to rest after running them dry.

  there’s poetry inside every one of us, crack open your ribcage and strike a match against your heart, you’ll see the caveman drawings tattooed along the

 

  inner linings of your flesh, early innovations of your story, telling you that you still don’t know you’re amazing, that you can do anything.

  yea, it’s true, there is no one as beautiful as you are when you’re open. our blood is not the same, but we can make the earth shake when we drain the ink from our fingers, sharing words lost alongside the roads at dawn.

  i left my prayer beads at the altar of all my midnight explorations, giving thanks to the stories i have been left with, but there are no mantras for the dead. i still stain their words with my blood, but they light fuses to shoot rocks through our past, broken muses plaguing early morning words drizzled onto scraps of paper, breaking the silence of the calamity clack clack clack of the keyboard, fully automatic words escaping the cavities not yet filled in my bones, burning cigarettes on my forearm i have named them adam—

  second chance deliriums injected into my veins, adam, we grow farther apart from each other, but i still offer up sacrifices of myself so i can taste the cigarettes on your tongue, i pen my thoughts into you, adam, i pray that you will walk with me into the next world

 

  adam, i am still searching for the crossroads of our story, and as long as i can remember, this is how the story goes.

  i hitched a ride on an airplane, rode it wherever it wanted to go. sat through turbulence, the pushes and pulls. closed my eyes, so i could imagine our story without the words. only i didn’t have to imagine, our words never existed.

  i rode this plane all night long. made a stop in some town i never heard of, and when i saw you, i draped my fingers on your surface much like god would were he still alive today. you kick start my heart with a taser and left me wanting—desperate to return…

  but when my plane took off into the sky, there was no camera behind me, no fade to black, no credits rolling up to tell us the parts we played in each other lives.

  left with the drifting delirium you had lured me into, writing apocryphal manuscripts out of broken typewriter keys; typesetting unanswered emergencies, like the night you huddled against me. remember? how your body quaked from the cold

 

  we watched ghosts dance around our window, you humming melancholic love songs, and damn, you know magic was happening when you whispered our dreams between the notes.

  but magic isn’t always love.

  the next morning we shared our coffee in silence, shadows intertwining in the sun as we tried to shake the break of character we exposed each other to. lost in the sacrifice we could not make, but fuck were we ready to return to anarchy the same night.

  we were children, enamored at the idea of attachment to each other, afraid of how easy we would break. our fragile arms holding our names, letters twisting between our fingers like were school girls in love.

  ashamed as i am, it took years for me to realize that we are not the end of a movie, so i took my typewriter out into lawn and set it on fire, frustrated with knowing it could only type your name—each letter engraved on slivers of paper.

  this poem is an apology, a letter of how far i allowed us to go, forgetting that some parts of ourselves need to remain buried.

  i have forgotten how you look, yet my body still trembles when i remember your taste.