The only resemblance of you sticks to stale cigarettes
that I flip from lip to hip and then to college sidewalk strip.
The bruises have since faded from much more than a neck.
Perhaps happenstance that chance has taken yours
and with it, I’m still functioning.
Walking, my-heart-doesn’t-beat to the sound of your talking.
And thoughts of you, are only glued to cancer sticks and petty conversations,
Both of which I throw away.

I refuse to be your wanton supplicant,
Heart longing for a memory worth longing for.
You are a distant call,
stretching as far as old bed sheets and still moment mornings
that I spent wasting, waiting for you to get “home”.
Just to hear that we were both alone.
And that you weren’t looking for a beginning,
Maybe I’m still forgetting
all the steps it took for me to walk away from an offer never given.

Repentance isn’t necessarily a negative reaction.
It’s only a fraction of the sin I’ve been soaking in.
And the mere stench of where your body’s been,
Stings my eyes and makes filth seem sufficient.
My heart aches in vengeance
of stale company.
I’m lost.
Kicking habits I’ve never had, and cigarettes don’t seem half as bad
in retrospect to the full body wreck
your disease trotted hands could have choked from me.

I am a silent bystander in your accidental scene
of karmatic irony, and easily I walk away,
flicking memories that don’t deserve to be named.
I hope your cancer eats away at you.
Like every “Kindred Spirit” promise you never meant to see through,
because I know the beauty that I saw in you,
was only a mirror image reflected from my own eyes.
A pedestal I built up, expecting you to climb to
when you were too drunk to clean up your own shit faced slime.

To me,
you were a well I could have fell into.
And when I returned, no one would have remembered my name.
Your causes for calamity are so tightly wrapped in vanity,
that I could see my body would be a challenging anthology
you would rather burn than read.
I realized more than half of me,
was writing out your obituary with finger full’s of animosity
collecting like a mist at the neck of my beer.           You spat,
“It is what it is, my Dear” that people are just pretending to be living without fear.

Between smoke.            And toke.
I felt it in the back of my throat,
like an answer you still couldn’t hear.
I was burnt out and parched
for a love not smothered to ash,
or a lover unfiltered,
blistered like sidewalk smut and debris.