You left me with no milestones to remember

No sweaters to return

Not a single picture to burn or untag,

No conversations to fondly look back on

No scar tissue to pick on

Just a lingering sadness that’s taken me months

To rinse off the sleeve from where

My heart once used to sit.

You left me with more questions than answers

The man always speaking in metaphor,

Left me with but a few words.

The vivid memories of the contortions of your face, ever irritable.

Your past in passive voice,

But always a run on sentence.

An ever looming figure, before me.

But I left you suddenly,

Defiantly

With resolve. 

I left you the way you were always afraid

Of keeping me, with commitment.

You were so afraid to be consumed

Or to be abandoned

That you never saw how slowly 

You were cementing me to walk away.

How every single abridge, built my case

And how slowly I was gathering embers

To start a fire,

Just so I could burn the bridge,

And keep it burnt.

You know I would write your name

Across my mattress after dragging you to

Friday Night Slam at the Nuyorican

Barely three poets in I’d ask you “Do you want to come home with me?”

And you would say “I thought you said you liked live poetry?”

I would breathe onto your neck

“Yes, I like alive poetry

You, My bed, Right now”

When we would get to my apartment

I would slam you against the bed,

Reach for my dresser,

And throw you a pen and a sheet of paper.

The smirk you had all the way home would fall

“Really?”

Catching your smirk I’d say

“No.

But tell me you don’t have a million things

To write about after you kiss me”

Q.E.D.

Maybe, you’re right.

You’re too damaged to fill the variables between us

I can feel the scar tissue “she” left,

But just when I’m about to get an angle 

You’re looking for all the ways to lock me out of the grid.

Probability, you call it. 

You and me, we’re two scalene triangles.

Acutely looking for some more congruency and a little less guesswork.

But for all that tangent you’ve gone on about the now baby,

It’s been you that’s been going ahead and doing the math.

I see the way you’ve been mapping me out of your head

And finding all the complex numbers.

Trying to find proof of why it won’t work.

One more day

Just one more goddamn equation.

Fuck your trigonometry. 

Q.E.D.

Two nights

Two nights ago, I dreamed you raised my legs and mounted them onto yours.

I rested my head on your shoulder. You clipped my toenails.

Like the most intimate we’ve never been.

Last night, I thought of you while  he raised me onto his lap.

I hoped that somehow all the gin and tonics could fool and cast a mirage.

I closed my eyes, could almost see your eyelashes and count them.

We interlocked fingers. I pretended they were yours welding into mine.

Heard his voice. It sounded exactly like that drawl in yours.

I imagined it was you talking to me through the pillows,

Distilling my body.

In the morning, I felt my dehydration.

I reached over for an oasis, but found a desert.

Reached over for you, but felt him reaching over to me, instead,

Canopying me with his arms, trying to get me to join him in his slumber,

But I, I couldn’t sleep. 

I thought, how funny it is that often people say they fall asleep best when they’re next to their lovers.

But if I were with you, I don’t think we’d ever get much sleep.

Smirk

Just by slanting your lips, flaunting your quirk

Sometimes I dream of watching you smirk

That crooked half- smile that slowly nurtures

Sometimes I dream of it kissing my sutures

Squeezing and sucking away all the murk.

A tease of a laugh that works like clockwork,

Something about that mischief keeps me up perk

By nature you know how to torture

Just by slanting your lips.

If I could fix your smile to make it work

Decompress your heart and make it jerk

I’d never try to make it full on cheshire

Because something only in a half-smile that stirs

A kind of passion that could make firework

Just by slanting your lips.

Fire

Sometimes I feel like apologizing to myself for being fire,
For I am not embers waiting to be gathered and ignited
Or a small pyre kindled for the sake of one-night survival.
Because I am definitely not a volcano waiting to erupt
Or the smoke signals that go off
When you leave your iron on too close to the door.
I am fire.
The kind that could burn all of Southern California
To the ground before plate tectonics
Could ever even think of breaking it away.
Because I’ve never flickered like a candle
Or burned out like a joint.
Everything is too much with me,
And nothing is enough to tame the wildfire
That takes hold within.
But there are nights I wish I was fickle like the rain,
Or as flighty as the wind.
Because I’ve become so inflammable
I am afraid that if anyone lights a match near me
They might set the entire world ablaze by second hand
And I have become so combustible,
Terrified someone someday might accidentally
Touch or even look at me the right way
That I’ll burn so mighty as to leave no fire left.
I am so terribly tempted then to just incinerate myself
To see if there is something that peels away at my core

More than this desire to burn.
But sometimes I wish I was like a lighter
So easy to turn on and off, on and off
Or like a light bulb with the sole purpose of burning
Until exhaustion.

But I am fire

Come hell or high water
It cannot wash me away.