Shallow

a girl, her boy told her, baby i can’t
be with you any more because darling,
i can’t get over the flesh on your bones.

and she’s leaning over the tub now,
hasn’t eaten in days, i think she’s
going insane.

my baby, i can’t look at him for the wounds
in his eyes, he makes my soul ache
and he makes me so afraid.

hearts, plastic emblems
i made in my art class.

took the shards of something i used to own,
and melted it together, and when it was fine again.
i stuck it to my chest and
god,
but it hurt like hell.

you were gone that day, gone another day,
and i wondered where you’d been:

(had you gone to the moon,
had you swallowed some pills, had you
melted into a puddle?).

and i kind of realized i kind of wished
you
were
dead.

If we were demons, if we pretended to be
real, could we wander into the sun, could we
learn to love each other again, if we
stopped caring, if we
looked in the mirror sometimes instead of
each other’s eyes, if we stopped loving
other people, could we maybe start
to find each other
again?

Or maybe if we stopped staring into the sun
and our eyes stopped burning and the tears stopped
flowing, we could pretend none of this ever happened,
we could go on with our short pitiful lives and hope
one day we would die a slow painful
agonizing lonely death so we would fit our
poetic ends.

Or maybe if we just stopped
altogether, it really wouldn’t matter at all,
anymore.

when you were dreaming,
i stole your heart.

i figured, you don’t use it much anyways,
it would be okay if i just snatched it away and
put it in my pocket.

yesterday, you held your cigarette between
your last two fingers on your right hand,
pulled my chin close, and examined my freckles.

“i always though the ones on your left cheek looked
like they might give you cancer someday.”

and your cigarette burned a hole in my
jacket collar, but that was okay, you said, it just
showed how much you cared for me.

“made things permanent,” you said, and
took a drag.

and i just smiled.