bitterness, woohoo!

....it don't have no title yet. i'm thinking: "what i would write about you if you broke my heart." haha. or something, although i think it'll just end up being 'misstep.'

I saw you yesterday,
picking up your dignity off the floor
you left my honesty
for the janitor to deal with
you deemed her too hard to hold onto
then asked why I didn’t break your fall.
This voice of experience
can’t sing you
a sonnet worth listening to,
but it might sound familiar
if you stare at it long enough.
you never wanted to believe
I had enough in my past
to leave leagues under me like the ocean
so you wouldn’t have to face
the cold that is submerging
you told yourself no waterbed this deep
would make itself
my predecessor,
but I know why you ran away.
Waves fill up my recent ancestry,
I told you from the beginning,
if you had come looking for solidity
you’d better learn
to talk with stains on your tongue
I taste like disappointment,
my infection was always diagnosed,
“misstep.”
When you said
tightropes were your specialty,
I started convincing myself
falling and diving look the same,
I confess,
I suspected
that your acrobatics matched
my illness letter for letter,
that’s why the pretending went so easy.
But when you hit the floor,
you blamed me for being translucent,
I replied
that intentional blindness
breeds distrust,
I might be reflective but I am not simple.
Read the backlog
it’s stapled together between
prescriptions for self-deprecation
I forgot to pick up,
I weaved you a disclaimer
wrote an apology for my introduction,
you said slippage was fine,
maybe you didn’t believe I was lost,
maybe you didn’t believe you wouldn’t find me.
Either way,
take no heed to my bitterness
when I tell you
the lifejackets are back in the shed.
I recommend the sandy ones,
it means they’ve made it back.
While you pretend to look for them,
I’ll pretend to notice the blood
leaking down your dimples,
giving away you never learned
disappointment leaves a salty aftertaste
it proves all the depth
you might have been too jealous to believe in
I might have been too arrogant to hide,
but trust me, boy
pasts are like ghosts
no one claims to believe in them,
but everyone leaves the back door unlocked
just in case.
I’d tell you not to run so fast,
but it struck me yesterday
that dignity would never leave honesty
for midnight to clean up.
So tell me I’m not an ocean,
I’ll remind you that you’re no swimmer.
When you wash out your mouth,
leave the disclaimer in the shed
and hope your absence hurts me.
You’ll learn someday,
tightropes stretch thinner by each season
and when you’ve got leagues
of mistakes to your name
you’ll find falling
is the least of your worries.