I promised myself that the last time would be the last time.
There’s the first one
the first line I’ll tell myself
that what I say can mean something. To me
or you
Of course it can’t.
Regardless,
We thrust meaning into the mundane.
Into empty coffee cups with the rims still stained by your lips,
pieces of paper with letters and symbols meticulously crafted between the lines
commensal companion
It should have meant something right?
Of course
I’m…
full of clichés (and melodrama) that you’ve heard a thousand times.
I know better than
to woo a girl with
you mean the world to me
I’d die without you
I’ve never met anyone like you
Hopefully with twenty thousand dollars of debt
I could do a little better than that.
So why don’t I just tell you that I drink so much
on nights when I can’t even hear the sirens of the ambulance
whisking away someone who was probably going to die anyway
because he was a dumbass and fell in love (probably with you)
Did that work?
Of course not
All my friends have therapists and all their therapists tell my friends
to tell me that
what I’m doing isn’t healthy.
But I don’t listen because all my friends are crazy
That’s why they’re seeing shrinks in the first place.
But the thought of lying back on a big comfy couch sounds tempting,
I just don’t like the idea of having to remember.
Remember when I first saw you
reading The Bell Jar and you tried to
analyze it with your precocious naivety
but I didn’t care and thought you were smart and
four months later after countless coffee shops
and restaurants and museums and plays
and strolls into meadows underneath the 134
I found myself alone with you in the dark on the beach and you told me what you feared the most and my ass was numb from sitting on the sand but I fell in love with you
anyway.
Remember when I took that trip up north
and came back with a little stuffed sea otter that I named Steinbeck because
we both love books but you told me that you didn’t want it and
you said that sea otters were just swimming rats
but I thought Steinbeck (the sea otter not the author) was cute anyway.
And I fell in love with you anyway.
Do you remember any of this?
Of course you don’t
Here they come
Derrida and Foucault with their lectures on language
talking about shit no one understands
but people listen
I listen
when you talk about how you’re incapable of
affection compassion depression.
no no, that last one was for me
with all my notes I still can’t piece together what that means,
hat I’m supposed to make it mean
when you grab my hand down on Los Feliz and someone in their car yells out
I hate your love
and I look at you, and I think it’s love
but I don’t know what that means.