with a crawl space stuffed with a thousand paintings, i decided to pull the hoodie tight around my head, close my one swollen eye, and reach a delicate hand through the sheer mucousy wall of fear floating between us to find your fingers; you were talking of writing letters to a fake somebody and making poems out of your lists and how you spend too much time being afraid of being poor, and when talking, you jut your perfectly angled chin away from me, appearing forthright and slightly domineering, until the words start crinkling, tickling, trickling from your lips, and it’s in those exact moments when the lights behind your eyes burst forth like meteorites, giving poets decades of heart ache; the second you left me, i had to grab tight the rubber counters, forcing gulp after gulp down the throat as each breath burned like lava, each exhale successfully smothering whatever hope i might have been sustaining, for, after all, good things like this do happen, but never to a girl like me.

-10.5.2007