i would die for a girl with bleached blonde hair
i don’t matter
“but you matter to me”
here’s the thing:
you don’t matter, either
Evan pt. 2
Overheard: “Who is Evan?”
”A friend.”
I am the lobe of the brain that throbs so people mistake it for the heart.
-
Evan is a projection of my savior complex, though I was fine with letting those ugly kids fall off the cliff. Evan is every thought I’ve ever filched from the bank vault; now that I’ve said it, I’ll never have to write them down.
Someday I’ll try to write him an epitaph / elegy / eulogy / I don’t know the difference, and it will consist of one word:
INSUFFICIENT.
I was fifteen and thought it would be a hundred pages long, but I also thought that if I penned “Evan is Dead” on my sleeves, he’d come back to me.
i want to go back to april/may 2012
because i didn’t have to talk about anything and even though i didn’t know how to write it, i never had to say it
because that’s when i was eating lunch near the river with eddie joe and people bought me ginger ale and i couldn’t do anything because i was so scared
and i wrote about tommy, and it hurt all over, and “you gotta take a chance on something, sometime, pam”
and that was when i first saw fight club and fell asleep every day while i watched the office and there weren’t medical names for what was wrong with me, i was just sad, i wasn’t on meds and i wanted narrow shoulders and i wanted to be angel
because everything was rainsoaked and clear light awful and i didn’t write and nobody knew
and this isn’t even right
that’s all
the only black boy in new york
carve your sister’s name into the tree trunk // carve your sister’s name into her bedroom wall after she leaves // carve your sister’s name into all the family photos // insist that she was named after you // insist you are the firstborn son // carve your sister’s name into the tree trunk and start a fucking forest fire
you’re an artist, not an arsonist // and you didn’t tell me her name until you forgot mine // and you may turn away // you may turn away // you may turn away
concert
New York… the center of the universe. We’re so sorry we cancelled on you… we’re so sorry… do you— do you think you could find it… in your hearts to forgive us?
…
I think that means yes
Yes, Henry, This Poem Is About You
if you are reading this, then your hair is soft and translucent and cropped short, and you are muscled all over, and your name is henry, and you won’t tell me what’s wrong in your head. if you are reading this, then your name is henry, and you won’t tell me what’s wrong so i’ll have to imagine it, and i imagine your nosebleed dripping into a shotglass, and i imagine you sitting in your parents’ bathroom for hours, trying to cry but not because able to. if you are reading this and your name is henry, and you wrestle at school and catalyze rot gut on the weekends, and you hold on to my hand as long as possible whenever you shake it, and you won’t tell me what’s wrong, then you will someday leap into the hudson river, your skin blanching with ecstasy until you realize that the filthy water is soaking into your bone marrow, but you will continue to float there with the plastic bottles and fish skeletons while the people on the bridge ponder what to do, and you will not have broken your back, but instead something stranger. if your name is henry, then you were named after an english king, and if you were named after an english king your life is destined to be a battlefield. or a nightclub. the nightclub of your life will be dim and smokeless and throbbing with music that seems to come from the stomachs of every girl on the dancefloor. one of the girls will be colored violent purple and call herself a queen, and you’ll hold her hand and kiss her and you will mean everything to each other, ie there is no one in the entire world you love less. she will hold onto your hand longer than you wish she would and someday you will tell her what’s wrong in your head and she will look right through you like you are the spray that crests ocean waves, and she will dive in from a high altitude, she will dive into you. she will break her back.
execute
the most terrible phrase in the english language sits uncomfortably
between my legs. “with my thighs,” replied anne boleyn
when asked how she planned to stay atop her horse. and i thought
she was going to kiss me. i was so sure she was going to kiss me.
