Its been a few years, some days i wish i never met you, or loved you...

Truth is i’m hurt.

You loved me until you didn't, then used me because i was the only one there after all the bs.

i just wish you didn't act like i don't exist anymore.

How do you get over it so easy?

The way you looked at me when we ran into each other, so much nothingness in your eyes, so different from when you used to look at me with sparkles in them.

i truly think our love was the once in a lifetime love, a love meant to last.

Oh well, everything does have an expiration date...

my innocence? Kept

in this old gray box;

a fistful of dry leaves

turned up to receive

rain.

It must have died

planted deep

in the ground

I forgot I‘d buried

it in, now a decayed

and long

disintegrated memory.

or did I lose it long ago

in my 77‘ Nova

with you in my lap

shifting gears, pulling

the hill in low gear?

hands on my shoulders,

hips swaying to the 80s

lost in the rhythm

of your thighs.

I don’t blame you for your anger, but did you have to be so relentlessly cruel? I’m not sure you ever truly loved me, after all. Then again, I know I deserved your wrath - deserved the hard, cold force of reality shoved down my throat. Still, it’s not like I didn’t punish myself enough, beat myself up repeatedly. I promise I was harder on me than you ever could have been.

I don’t blame you, I really don’t. I didn’t intentionally set out to hurt you. I was just so damn lonely, day after day, week after week, month after month, and then years passed, and I wondered if I’d ever feel alive again. I felt so old and withered - abandoned in the perpetual struggle of our marriage. All my efforts felt futile, disparaged, and I truly thought I might die. The need for affection became a palpable thing, growing inside me like a cancer - a volcano preparing to erupt. I never would have guessed I could succumb to such temptation, but I guess I’m more human than I thought. More than anyone thought, for that matter.

I don’t blame you – I’d be angry, too. I’m a sinner in the worst of ways. It's an irony for sure, because I’m not narcissistic – was not at all like you were in our relationship. But suddenly, my overwhelming need took precedence. All I could seem to focus on after years of being ignored was the gnawing, burning need inside me, as if I was an infant in need of sustenance and nurturing. And then one day, I was extended the slightest branch of affection, much like the apple given to Eve, and I grabbed hold of it as if my life depended on it. I’m sorry. Truly I am.

I don’t blame you. I was wrong – so very wrong, but I’ve learned to forgive myself. More importantly, I’ve learned to forgive you. I know now that we were two unfortunate, sad souls, bound in a vice of marriage that should have been forged open years sooner. Unhappy people can become desperate people, and we were both desperately seeking an escape. I forgive you. I forgive myself.

My forgiveness has lent a new born renewal to my life, releasing me from my own self-loathing as well as the loathing I once felt for you. Now, in the later years of my life, I am able to see the better moments we shared, and I am thankful in a way I never thought I would be. Life throws us curved roads when we expect straight ones, so we must adapt, must learn to navigate the courses. We could have chosen to continue to feed the hatred, but instead, we chose to free it into the universe and feel something more – something unexpectedly better: a recovered friendship and a different kind of affection.

No, I don’t blame you - not anymore. Unfortunate choices were made, but we have both learned from these mistakes. We’ve let go of the bitterness and have moved forward in lieu of regressing to a point of no return.

No, I don’t blame you. Instead, I am thankful for you and lessons learned. Most of all though, I am thankful I don’t blame you – or myself - anymore.

bloated and gray, his body lays there

300 pounds heavy

and coats the curtains and the carpet

and the leather davenport

in some cologne of its own unworldy category

it was three days since

the wife was unknowingly turned a widow

until her eyes were branded

like some spanish bull

by a wretched Adam stretching his fingers towards

the phone on the floor

all the stories she'd imagined telling him -

the Cuban summer with its air mud-thick draped over

chipped pastel buildings you'd think only ghosts could ever live in,

finding refuge from the Havana sun tearing a hole into the sky,

only out once the bitten hostia of a moon is raised over the city

pale light piercing through the canopy of telephone wires

gone as the door unhinges its jaws

I saw brown throw up on the floor.

Don't remember the night before.

I try to sit up and get the spins

Hold on to my bed but vertigo wins.

Tacos and tequila and chocolate pudding

On the floor, walls, bed, and me, all my doing.

Still drunk, head a-spinning, and I smell like ass

I crawl out of bed, clothe myself, and get to class.

Hour late and reeking of barf, booze, and pickled ham

I had no recollection later of even taking the exam.

Classmates told me later that I'd earned an A

But only 'cause I'd shit my Hanes on that day.

I like to think of myself as an awkward, little ghost, blending with the background, moving about unnoticed. Moving in silence, yet hyper aware of all that is happening around me, as if the numbness hasn't set in yet and I am a newborn ghost, someone with a youthful soul, someone who has not yet tired of roaming the earth but feels like it's a whole new world just waiting to be explored. As if I hadn't done enough exploring alive. I get to revel in the feeling of being an outsider, looking in, examining each and every person's life, closer than ever, never giving away even a hint of my presence. I feel sneaky, like a child watching something that they've been warned not to, but it's fun in a way because I get to see a whole new side, to people I thought I always knew. But this is a blessing and a curse. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss and I should remember not to indulge my curiosity by following people into their homes because sometimes, curiosity breaks your heart. It leads you to answers you realize you never wanted. You were perfectly content with the version of themselves that people wanted you to see. So I move, from place to place, person to person, hoping I might find someone who's the same as they are behind closed doors. Until the panic sets in, until I go mad with worry that nothing is as it seems, until I feel no more like myself, I am content with moving in silence, examining each and every person's life, closer than ever, never giving away even a hint of my presence.

The babies are dead

on the sea. Far from home, watery shapeless arms

embracing the little bodies, the little cries fed brine,

the timbers cracking like skulls.

Silver fish, in days to come gripped in heavy net,

split open on china plate rimmed with gold, Wedgewood and Waterford,

generations back through centuries and hurricanes and wide

sargasso calms,

bore the small squalling things down and down

to the floor from which rises Azores and Iceland and

Canary and the rolling green land of the mothers

who are told

You will bear the children of rape or you will be hanged.

Years away they will tear the lightning from the sky and put it in machines,

but also they will build drafty houses with cellars they will fill with

bones and the smell of turf on the wind will set the fist around the heart.

Better to fall forever into the gray palace of the seabed

than to eat grass and dirt in the dolmens of a throatcut land.

This is what the mothers say, but they speak with the tongue and not the heart.

Turning over and over, head over heel, slowly turning and tumbling,

somersaulting

held by no cord

a greater hold

Ah but they say it is the most peaceful way to die, he tells them on the beach

when the news comes in

weeks later. But what does he know, who will break his neck falling from a ladder?

Is not the world a ladder, she thinks, all of us God's creatures climbing and going down

at whim it seems. And what is at the top but the land of

dead children, we wail to see them again and this is the sound we all have within us

that we are desperate to unhear with song and silence and drink and

lightning in machines

automatons to take the helm of the world and run it onto the breakers

and shake us all down a few rungs of the ladder.

[You used to hold my hand when the plane took off]

A tiny small coughing then

a tiny small

belly

head

bottom

settles on soft sand

this is the final peace of the in-between

if there is such a thing as peace

in this desert of sea

this is the calm

coming to rest within this garden of souls

waving like sea grass though there is nothing here

just the weight of the entire ocean holding

like a womb.

Someday the sea will boil away just as the land

and the coils of chain and broken ships and the thick black python of cable

that powered the machines

will crack in the sun

and the bleached bones of coelacanths and whales

will be the cathedrals to be dismantled,

to be rebuilt into a new ladder

so we can carry the babies up

- the sea will give up her-

after so much time in dark

let them, as warriors, bathe in the calm

milk

of the stars

for once.

Every day I move in silence. I am alone. I see many people living their lives as I walk home. Eating in groups, shopping with friends, holding hands, dad's holding sons, mom's talking with daughters: people connecting all around me. I don't understand this world, but I envy the idea of it. I eat alone in the morning, walk to the bus I take to work, work in a meaningless job that requires little interaction, take the return bus to the last stop, and walk to my small apartment, to eat alone again. My apartment building has other tenants, but the turnover is great, and it seems a tiring and useless act to try to relate to the casual. Most of them that I’ve seen look as fatigued with their own repetitive lives as I feel.

I was abandoned early in life, leaving me without conventional social skills; without proper cheerleaders? supporters? encouragers? that live in that imaginary world I envy. I am left without the necessary drive to seek more. I exist to survive; I survive to exist. I am a stray in a busy society. I blend into the background and go unnoticed.

Every day I move in silence...among you.