the things no one wants to hear and i don't want to say

you used to be
a constant barrage
ripping through my mind:
day, night,
or those desperate in-between times
and each thought
resonated within me
everywhere i hid

i remember these days
i thought it was my love for you
i made myself sick thinking about you and
put myself in the position
to hear about everything you did with her
every fight you two had
i thought it was the breaking of a relation ship
and you would come sailing back to me
on the ocean of ink collected from poems i had written for you

i was so wrong

now i only think of you
in the miniscule column of space between
my musings and wonderings of him
and i can only shake my head
at the juxtaposition between your definition of love
and his

each time you said you loved me
it was an act of desperation; my declarations
dripped off my acidic tongue
much the same-- it all tasted like vodka
that summer
and each time one of us slipped up
and spoke of the future
we hurriedly sought a way to
hide behind more shallow adverbs
(like when you brought up us having children
only to shoot yourself down
right after)

and when we fooled around
in your car
on dark summer nights i always felt myself
hiding behind my eyelashes
some mask to throw you off from my despair
i hated being naked around you,
my snow white skin
i could never get comfortable in the
hazel spotlight of your eyes

i thought i loved you
but then again you thought you loved me, too
so maybe i didn't
maybe i just loved the idea of you:
a constellation of a boy whose ears held holes the size
of the ones in his logic,
spitting one-liners
out of the same megaphone he spat his
distaste for the whole wide world
and every whore in it
or maybe i just loved who i was with you:
riding shotgun next to the rich boy
who picked fights with society
because he couldn't find a niche to wiggle his way into,
i felt like queen of the night
i felt like i was the only woman capable of taming the wild lion that was you

i was wrong then
you're wrong now
the only thing you ever had right was this:

walking away you challenged me to
let someone in past my castle walls and
to just be an open book
with someone
for once in my life
well, honey, i found him,
the ocean to my desert and the
wildflowers blooming boldly between the cracks
in the sidewalk of my heart
i didn't have to let him in: he let himself in
and that's something you never once had the balls to do