you'd wish, but...

i think about it all the time, the

way your tongue lashed furious lies behind the sweetest layer of rot, and your pantomiming

hands that delegated and ceded and cast off all your aches to me.

yes,

i think about them often-times when my brain splits open the shell, pushing around yolk on my plate with the tasteless beans that follow, baked as sludge on my palate,

and so it's been a year since you came and left me, 

been a year since two pairs, four hands, tumbled the house of cards. arrived wreathed in white daisies, emptied me out

and painted with cutters the fickle names of unwanteds onto blank canvased skin, presented as a whole, complete being, now projected 

onto that computer, that devil, with ashen text and audio whimpers.

so i have to ask.

hey, was i ever

good enough for you?

or was that speech, that charade, that tiresome act of folly and featherlight kisses 

crawling around your feet and playing nonsense foolish games

winning my own prizes, held close to where old scars lay—

either way, 

tell me, tell me i was your jester. tell me i played the clown. because if i had played the good man, the wise man, 

what would that mean for myself?

...

i'd like to say thank you to the bars that bloomed 

in supermarket-wrapper scan codes amidst the mundanity of normal life

pasted as a bandaid over my corneas

a black wall holding back gallons you had picked and purchased at a whim, and

with one red scan, i'll be yours forever.

except it wasn't like that. wasn't this easy. wasn't the claim you made.

so now i've been repeating the same, mechanical motions and crossing same, mechanical days off my lines, and i'd realize, in due time, i'm a liar, too. because

somewhere, i hope you still

worship a part of me.

somewhere, i hope you

rip off the bars over my eyes and

remind me of how much i missed you.

~ 4:18 AM. FEB 2026.