when you were a boy.

i try to remember the details so i will always have them. half of my heart, pulled out of my chest and sat in front of me, stretched out to a thin quiet man with a buzz cut and old black sweater that smells like clean dirt and cheap beer. neatly patched shorts and worn out skate shoes and rolling a lighter in between his thumbs. his voice is lower than i remember or maybe he’s just hoarse. it’s late and he was always quiet and i always ran on high, angry, alive, sedentary, hurt and vicious. it is all i can do not to point my fingers and screech, shattering the silence and rousing the crack heads from their near by alleys.

you! i made sure your homework got done! i sewed your pants! i fed you! i held you! i fought off your detractors when none of that was enough and endured your pinches, slaps and jeers when something had to come out, and when you would pray all night to God and nothing ever changed! you and i never changed! we just strained outwards and held on! even when you sank i held on until one day the body was gone, and then i planted your memory in my brain’s garden and waited for it to sprout! well has it?! has it?! what have you done?! where have you gone?! what will become of me?!

he asked if this was ok.

all these years.
i gave them to you.
stuffed in the pockets of your jeans
and your sweaters.
folded and tucked behind the tongues of your shoes.

i can believe you

because we shook on it.

better get back to juding books by their covers.

these people are guests in my home. if i had taken you to any of their homes, they would have been courteous and respectful to you as a courtesy to me, and because they’re good people and would have wanted both you and i to be comfortable, and all you could do was disrespect them based on their looks and lifestyles. so not only did you embarrass yourself, you embarrassed me and made my home a place my guests felt unwelcome in.

thanks.

when you hit me and when i saw stars.

There are all these painful and bright moments that snap like lightening or punches in the face. Your nose crushes against your upper lip and oh shit, there you are and oh shit there you are again and that might be your blood or the bastard may have just split his knuckles. Either way, babe, you’re a fucking star. You’re my star and everything about you is bright and perfect, and destroyed, running black, and always running. Up, up and over the fence and up and fucking away, and my heart is racing, my lungs are burning and we are going the distance.

When I dream of my brother he has your face. He is long dead and has your face, but he is smaller than you, and his features are slightly more delicate. Regardless it is always you at my door when I find myself asleep and in a place that doesn’t make sense. With what I imagine to be Matthew’s adult voice, you explain to me all the ways I’m ridiculous, and all the ways you will set me right, a fierce hand on my shoulder and a knowing look in your eyes that could be his. This is the way I will step and that way and we won’t dance, we’re not civilized enough for that. But we’ll step, toes crashing, elbows smashing ribs, your chin striking my forehead. Step one, step two, step five, it is all the same disaster. It’s our blood running out of a hundred different wounds.

It’s me waking up to nothing. A flash of light, a memory of lost breath.

when i was just a menace.

One day, you will be a father, or an uncle, or a brother-in-law and you will want proof of the way you were here and now, when we were hesitant and distant, these bodies kept miles away, never eager to violate the space we so carefully maintained. One day, you will want my eyes on yours, and the hands of my memory all over your face, committing every angle, every dimple and notch to my brain. I, your timekeeper, your vessel, your record of successes with a heart and you, my best memory of what could have been if I had been different, thinner, smarter, or if I had needed you more. Instead, I make due. Instead, I record, and recite our time together. You had that jacket, and those same pool shark button down shirts, and the same young forceful self in the same old shoes. Quiet, intense and drunk, you pull me closer to shove me away, and I keep myself content by knowing there will come a time when you will want to see yourself the way I did then.

You’ll want to see your face angled up to mine in a way I could never forget, your eyes boring into my eyes, telling all these truths. You will want to remember yourself as honest, and lovely. You will say your intentions were good, but never explain what they were in the first place when you pulled me in and made me your monster. Like any creator, whether you loved me once is irrelevant now. Now there is only the insatiable need to understand how

I

love

you,

how my tongue-ties and my fingers go numb. Intrigued and disgusted, you will want into these gritty bits of my heart, pulling away at the chambers, ripping out ventricles and tossing them aside the little sticky bits I kept for you. Years of being careful of me gone, you’ll leave me ripped open, red, unsatisfied, and in pieces and hideously incomplete. This carcass, this bit of vile skin, fluttering around the cavity in my chest rendered by those hands. I had always admired the long fingers on those hands, the square nails beds, the-

And this is what I deserve and what I am left with, when it’s over.

she lives upstairs in room 29.

we switched roles quite effortlessly. i wake up to that feeling in my chest, roll out of bed looking shocked and hollow eyed, sipping from a bottle of water, a can of full throttle, it is what it’s… you know whatever. i don’t have the time or the words. you don’t have the patience, we don’t have the heart, and i don’t have the energy since i gave up eating.

the roofs are still white and the leaves are still poking up, shocked under a thin layer of snow. i’m still drinking, angry that it has come to this.

run on for a long time.

i am making poor choices by accident. i am living like i am dead.

i wonder sometimes if….

(try not to hate me too much. i just.. i can’t… sometimes the best i can say is i love you….)

someday god’s gonna cut ya down.

When we knew the names of the living we treated them with reverence. It was simple really. We woke up, we brushed our teeth, washed our faces and we repeated them continually in our minds. Like monsters, our bodies and those names ran themselves. We were vessels of these big and terrible things, humming constantly like fat beetles of cement all upright and proud with stick legs pressed to their bellies.

I felt tiny then, in your white car on the black pavement, all the lights off and the industrial hardness punching me each time I breathed in.

…

…

upon the rails
among the weeds
i had a moment of
serenity
i saw you stand
in all the green
upon the rusting rail
balancing

you were
the only answer
my plans
spun all around you
five years in the wrong, i am assured
my name to you is just another word

and in your bed
in morristown
you had magazines
thrown around
from under them
the phone it rang
and in the margin there
you wrote the number down

you were
the only answer
my plans
spun all around you
five years in the wrong, i am assured
my name to you is just another word.

-mike doughty