he reaches within her and pulls out tinsel and christmas amongst alibis of lost lovers and shipwrecks along shores cracked off the earth. she touches his chin and can taste mountains of empty bottles of spirits cast off from rooftops but land unbreakable into alleys made of tired bricks and devious mortar. i had been the pinnacle of success, he says and stretches open his chest so that moths can erupt from his sternum and take flight with dizzying turns into a sun that never sets nor rises, merely tosses and turns through this nightmare along the horizon.

nothing was and is ever enough. not promises, not kisses, not even blood. talking in the dark a solitary lamp in the corner that could have been hundreds of miles of away. passion spent, the nausea of the inevitable, the beckoning night laced with roads leading away from everything. I pull on this cigarette with a desire that my body can only suffer.

you abandon this, like everything else. you leave things. undone, wrecked or even barely begun. works in progress, works of incompletion. walked away, without stopping, without ever turning back. with the sense that all that you’ve left behind is a narrow road of despair.

not a day goes by where i do not calculate the math of my suicide. i tally 401k’s and savings accounts, i estimate funeral homes and burial plots. i pour over the fine print of insurance policies and the period before the dispersal of funds. and even in death, i still come out up short. the sum of it, or rather the difference is, ultimately my family cannot afford my death, cannot afford for me to pay what is truly owed.

i expect no valentine’s, i expect no promises. i’ve broken every one i have ever made, i’ve been broken down into unrecognizable parts. i sift through joints and fissures, i misalign and fail. nothing fits. i no longer fit. i am trying, i am still irrevocably broken, off set, a juxtaposition of betrayal, of something once human, once tender. i am hysteria and rage, i am the drowning thing out of the sea and gasping for relief. i’ve run out of denials, i draw strength from losing time, i draw strength from my time being short. i expect no valentine’s, i expect vengeance, i am pleading to be judged and rendered.

i expect no valentine’s, i expect no promises. i’ve broken every one i have ever made, i’ve been broken down into unrecognizable parts. i sift through joints and fissures, i misalign and fail. nothing fits. i no longer fit. i am trying, i am still irrevocably broken, off set, a juxtaposition of betrayal, of something once human, once tender. i am hysteria and rage, i am the drowning thing out of the sea and gasping for relief. i’ve run out of denials, i draw strength from losing time, i draw strength from my time being short. i expect no valentine’s, i expect vengeance, i am pleading to be judged and rendered.

I’m dead on the surface but I’m screaming underneath. – Coldplay, Amsterdam
and i wake out of storms to find the surface tension of your skin taut along the palm of my hand the beat of drum whose rhythm i ignored because i countered it with my own the echo space that mimics silence but explodes into grace

she asks, are you doing this
are you doing this to hide her? and i said
no, no more her, of her, hiding her, i am not
i’m no longer hiding, hide me here
and i point to between her legs, i point
to the soft part of her neck where the skin plies
off the bone of her skull and i kiss her, hide me, i said
i’m doing this for you to keep me hidden

you step forward, the spotlight finds you. glare pitch white, your skin pales, the crowd mutters to itself whispers of disbelief, of mocking. you gaze over stage right. he is there, waiting for the role you cannot suspend the crowd’s disbelief that you are him. she brushes past him, joins you on stage. another light, harsher, makes her red lips black. the crowd finally falls silent. you take her hand, place the other slightly above her hip. the pianist starts a tune, you begin.