Here is where your carvings rest.

I began this slam on November 11, 2009 in the mid afternoon.

I completed this slam at 3 am in a donut shop, February 23, 2010.

Strumming, drumming, moving my fingers across this artificial wood

I can hardly peel my lids from themselves,

But I kind of rather like them where they are

Because I see you.

I see how you were before the time you said

that forever was not where we would be

as we trudged across the present.

Your presence lingers,

Behind the rhythmic batting my lashes do

To stay alive.

As they fall lifeless,

The contours of who you were caress my senses,

And I feel your fingertips begin to peel apart my thinned out flesh

 I feel my ribcage falter,

Allowing pieces of its bars

To split apart and allow you to slip in,

Draped by the dark I have hidden beneath

The rhythmic pulsations of who I really am.

I feel the purple running through my limbs

Slow just a little as its bravery is tested

And the value of color is weighed.

I feel my body exhale just a bit as you wedge your way in

Gracefully

Eloquently

Professionally

And remain

Nestled up in the nook of whispered past

and frightened future.

But how dare you cradle yourself within me

And commence this frenzy,

This unstable, frantic, unstoppable

Motion?

How dare you press yourself between my lids,

lashes,

the pages that I will never rewrite

no matter how many times I discover them?

The seams you have sewn

Won’t be anything less than intertwined.

How dare you press yourself between

my very breath

and call it home

when I never found that in you?

When you never gave me anything more

Than a plastic impression

as to what living

blindfolded by another could be?

I want you out.

I want more than anything to rip my dying lids

Alive.

Because I have finally found

That this oxygen I had been taking

Into foolish lungs will never be good enough

No matter how fast or how hard they pump

Filter

And create the breath that dances on leaves

It will never dance across your skin.

It will never find its way back into your lungs,

Your circulatory system,

And escape your lips as an utterance of life.

I want to forget every line of your face that I committed to heart

As we lay in the dark

And I prayed to God that I could have this one thing always.

I want to forget the curve of your soul against mine

And the way I pressed myself close enough to believe

That sometimes breathing isn’t needed to survive.

I once told you that not even fairy tales

Were capable of us,

Not even the world could fathom us

And you once said that

the ink of my words would sink into your skin

and find somewhere to rest assured.

That my very being was your breath.

But you are a fucking liar.

I never knew that ink was ephemeral

Until I watched you let the waves take it back out to sea

Like a scraped out, scratched out, sunken in

Love note on the beach.

I never knew that your pearly whites

Were stronger than gates

As your guilt swallowed itself back down your throat

And your words struck my ears like symphonies do the blind.

Sometimes not even seeing eyes can spot the ugly

through the beauty of sound

because as your lips moved in that curve

I wanted to mold myself into,

the motions of you stretched my body thinner than

my patience.

I never knew that I was dying

Until that time I told you, maybe I need you,

And your silence was resounding.

Your apologies are resounding

As they reverberate upon the walls of my conscience,

Beating into me that everything you ever told me

Was the authentic craft of one liners tucked into

Your back pocket,

Held on reserve for her, her, me, her.

I never knew that breath
is irrelevant to existence until the day
I choked on truth

And you buried your lungs.