February Lies

Listen, can you hear us, pouring our heart’s grief into the keyboard?

clackity-clack-clack my nails tap a peppy drum beat, staccato and quick–

that way,

the eavesdropping neighbors next door’ll never know the song’s so sad.

But it’s there, it lives on–

if my words could guide you through the dance routine

they’d yank your puppet strings vengefully hard and too fast,

if my words were a director’s cut

they’d feature every actor on their knees screaming beneath

CGI whirlwinds of ghosts

roaring over discordant dronings of the orchestra,

if my words could carve the earth

any sharper than a beach stick

she’d be rubble by now,

if my words could level you

like your own heartbreak

we wouldn’t have to have this conversation.

—

I have a deadly survival instinct:

I can’t read faces, intents,

so this wordy brain of mine

fills them with paragraphs of disgust

(better to assume the worst and stay safe, right?).

I can’t go home, so I’ve gone running where no one can keep up,

won’t ever catch up,

that’s how I’ve stayed alive,

chosen to survive.

But I set that all on pause for you.

The mind games, the fight and flight, I

slowed,

erased space,

opened

up

for your sake.

Ha. ha?

(Do you listen, still, for my giggling tongue, and play that game where you guess whose jokes I found more funny?)

HahahhahaHAAHAAHEAHHAAAEAAAAHH

These laughs don’t have weight for the breadth of your betrayal

These words don’t have breath under weight of your vile veil

but at least I know better now:

the disgust has no trust

for a reason

the reason being you

of course

whose words

still tangle up my puppet joints when I try to dance free

whose words scream so loud that I orchestrate war songs back

just to be heard

whose voice carved apart my soft sandy planet

and sipped up my core like snow cone syrup and jelly fruit gushers,

my insides echo as a cavern dripping up a peppy, staccato drumbeat

and the rhythm has replaced my whole heart,

but I am still running

crying to books I’ll never read again

burning in the crucible of our memory cruse

catching your gaze in watery reflections over the oceans I fled across

and even now

your eyes zap my stomach with lightning

and fill me with a thunder to blaze this whole place

in fire

so it might bow to you:

I am a storm

or perhaps I was just happy in yours,

raising my hands to the heavens you came from

calling torrential downpours

to land devastation

on this undying depression.

Do you remember

me?

Because I will forever run

from you.