I was never much for dancing, but you and I could dance all night. Your poetry was soft and your love was hard. I danced on the edge of a life I knew would end. I watched you, a caterpillar; turn into a butterfly. I woke up to a caterpillar in the morning.

It’s hard making chalk lines to live your life inside. My mind wanders over each line and into something, or someone, else. I play on my brain like a clunky, old broken-down keyboard at a yard sale – not mine, not really, but it’s the game I’ve got. Everything looks like a nail when all you have is a hammer, and my head is a hammer alone.

I look for limits to my mental states and find none. I look for the flashes of The Real coming back to roost, but the birds are gone. I have them carved onto my chest to remember being so close to them, because I don’t feel them like I did before. They’re my children that never visit, but I hope they’re dead and not thriving. I hope they never call again.

I keep building nicer – and bigger – tombs for my empty self. I pour it into the lavishness of luxury apartments, and now a house, in the hopes that nothing comes home to roost. I smile with the smilers and laugh with the laughers and nobody keeps score.

Somewhere wings are flapping – it’s getting late. I know I should go, but can’t we dance to one more song? I close my eyes and feel your breath against my neck and shoulder. Nobody gets a second song and I know my eyes tell you that when they yell at you. We all love to dance on someone else’s dime – we never want to be the one to pay so we keep hopping in and out of beds and heads and hearts.

Love is a losing game, but we hurt each other like life is zero sum. I should mind my P’s and Q’s and cross my T’s and I’s, but maybe I want to pay dearly. My dear, I feel I have already. We walk – wounded – and crawl, cradled in fake love and a false sense of confidence. He doesn’t deserve you, they thought, but nobody deserves what we do to each other.

Life is not all that much to lose, but love – love is. Love makes the ticks tock and the beautiful dance continue. The shell that remains is broken in the places it used to play and an abhorrent tragedy of leaves. A thumbnail cut a week ago – now dry, cracking and tasteless. The dust comes for us all, and becomes us. But love – love is. That’s the best game in town.

I watch the rage distort your

paper, silky wrappings,

contorting your love into fire flickering

through your skin and eyes and mouth.

The back breaks and

the stomach turns as

the mouths dry up on words, which

could never say a damn thing we need.

The jagged start-stop movement of life –

all edges of sandpaper-wrapped boards –

kills me in a thousand and one cuts.

I want to shake, spread and shakes again –

limbs wrapped in saran wrap rules and laws –

I want to scream.

Who was I,

to become this?

Or who was I not,

to fail this hard?