I hope your badge is still intact,
The one on your Harley jacket,
“Sex Champion.”
Bold. Confident. Delusional.
You wore rebellion like your tattoos,
Etched over what you no longer wished to keep.
Defiant smiles,
Smart-ass remarks.
But the day I held you,
Your whole chest collapsed into mine,
And for a moment,
I felt the weight of every forgotten dream and heartache,
You'd buried under all that protective armor.
Still, I hope it makes you feel like a man,
Even though your idea of seduction
Was mouths full of fire,
Crawling on bare bruised knees,
Treading through the river of desire,
Only to wake parched,
With desert dust settled at the back of our throats.
I called it hunger.
You dressed silence as mercy,
Hiding all the ugly pettiness
Beneath your oh-so-polite exterior.
And the cruelty in how softly you sighed
You said sex wasn’t the point.
Until it was.
Until that was all your tongue-tied cowardice
Could muster in the face of my unburdening.
As if love were something to ration.
As if my body could be borrowed,
While a “no vacancy for the heart” sign
Hung quietly at the foot of your door.
No, I wasn’t perfect.
I left, over and over,
Trying to drown my own feelings
In floods of indifference,
So it wouldn’t drag me back,
To the tender awakening,
I discovered in the safety of your hands and lips,
A place that now only echoes,
With the resounding desperation of my own voice.
Still,
I don’t regret how I showed up with an offering.
I twisted myself small enough to fit into your palm,
Even when it felt like pouring gasoline
Onto my own wounds,
Ready for the burn and the wreckage,
If it meant you'd find
A safe landing right in the middle of the smoke.
But I stopped setting myself ablaze
When my love shriveled
In the cold carved out
By your apathy to my pain.
You were my softest war.
And somewhere in you,
I hope it still echoes,
Not my name.
Not my perfume.
Not the way I kissed your nose.
But the way I never made you feel small
For being so afraid,
To hold things,
You had no idea how to love.
This is the final uprising.
The mess I won't tidy.
In the unfinishedness.
The parts I’ll never send.
The parts you’ll never read again.
This is the ending:
I no longer bleed color for a world that never illuminated mine.
“I carry fire. And I don’t hand it to those who only want my light and can not offer me any warmth.”