fire for love

There was a growing hatred

in my heart,

fed by the years of waste

which I have lived.

Great, cancerous,

and bellowing out its

steam through bones that never were.

If I close my lips tightly,

I can taste its piss in my mouth.

If I cared too much, I would surely wither and die.

The smiles in the wasteland are luscious and leering,

washing away this nursing hurt.

Disgusted,

I sat alone and tried to glare at the

world through the windows

in my head.

I was so small,

so bent and troubled that the

meanings behind the images

were lost on me.

If I’ve seen a dove,

I want it to fly away.

If I’ve seen a flower,

I couldn’t bring myself

to take

its scent

into my

throbbing head.

In this place,

my mind was a geyser,

vomiting forth the frail fear

of what I once was.

I was so small,

a tiny thing made of broken pieces.

These crumbling reminders

couldn’t be mended,

they couldn’t be healed by time,

and they couldn’t find their way back home.

Maybe I should have given up.

Maybe that was what

eternity was trying

to tell me.

I wanted to fuck it all away.

I wanted the world to stop turning

so I could see the destitute faces leering at the sun,

waiting for it to burn the disease away

from sick eyes.

But no hope came,

nothing relieved me.

I was a small man with

small dreams that would

never come to true.

There in my darkness,

I was complete.

Nothing stood in my way.

I was my own god,

fierce and jealous of nothing.

The primal screams

in my head

were loose and

contemptible;

a mirror image of the

nothingness that surrounded me.

It was set free of the hate

and the hurt

and the nagging voices that

nailed me down in their

loving crucifixion.

And that’s where I died.

With every lie,

every mistruth,

every blood saturated mouthing death,

I killed away the terror at those around me,

holding tight to the nakedness in my soul.

I was devoured by myself,

never again to be the same insignificant,

throbbing

sack of skin

that trusted the unclean.

I was proper and new.

I was the beginning through the end:

a small

little nothing

with big dreams and nervous,

shaking hands.

I was a greedy,

fat child

with nothing

to lose

and nowhere to run.

I was the end.

“Where is the pain?” he asked.

“It’s in my spine,” I said. “It’s in my eyes 

and it lingers in my nightmares 

at night when I’m all alone."

 “Maybe you’re the problem. Do you always think this way?”

“Every time I get a chance,” I replied.

He smiled. “There it is then. You are the problem.  

You need to lose yourself.”

“How?” I asked.

“By forgetting who you are,” he replied. “There’s all this 

shit inside of you 

and you have to let it go. 

There’s no other way.”

“I can’t get her face out of my mind.”

I tapped the side of my head. “She’s a curse

I cannot break. I see her crying in the rain.

I see her sobbing all the time. 

It’s scraping away what’s left of me.”

“What did you do to her?” he asked.

“I broke her heart.”

“What did she ever do to you?”

“She loved me.”