The Exhibition Hall

Her presence fills the world

She fills the world with her presence 

She fills my sky in with void;

It hangs always over me.

The Void, IN me. 

A vacuum where the small victory

Of her friendship was,

That I'm no longer pretending 

I did not fantasize could bloom into every 

Kind of love. 

The Void;

The absence of everything I forced her to 

Force me to take away from Self,

A mirror of what I should become when 

The dust settles. 

The dust 

Gusting at the doors

Of this exhibit hall where she 

Sometimes plies a trade. 

I can feel by a gnawing dread or lack of, 

If she is inside or else some far away city,

An intuitive anxiety rises over the possibility of

Facing the deep shame that I will project

Onto her achingly emptying oceanic eyes,

-Her gaze that picked up every detail I tried 

Smuggling before her until I crumbled and felt

Compelled to throw every last insatiable need at her feet

And finally

Into her face,

Forcing her to rip up the last thin line of patience that I crossed.

Today I'll throw my tickets down

And push my way inside 

To search from the backs of every booth and shadow 

To determine if I can set this weight down 

Or else, glimpsing her-

Beeline for the bathroom stalls to vomit,

And wait for the world to end. 

Allow Me to Break My Own Heart

After whipping off the last poem

On the back of a roll of yellow raffle tickets

Between handing the tickets out

(trying to give it my all, really),

The exhibition hall went quiet. 

I saw two morning doves 

On a beam beyond the wall of windows

And my idiot brain thought:  

She's the one on the right, and

I'd be happen to be the pigeon on an adjacent beam 

Catching a contact high from the pigeon on the left

Who she is clearly meant to be with. 

Snippets

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To me you are the only true

Blond on the planet 

But is that even your natural color? 

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I fantasize a nightmare for the heart;

Someone points at me asking you

"Who's that" 

And like a stone's inscription: 

"I have no idea" 

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I'll write every last poem out

From under every last poet

Until every last crumb of you is gone

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