In Memory, We Surrender

​I leave for you.
Isn’t that crazy?
I left for you once,
and now I do it again daily.

1,762 days later, I can’t hold my hands straight
enough to keep from drifting into the street,
and nearly every night I witness death with
a gruesome and gut-wrenching repeat.
All of my efforts to forget you are forgotten when I sleep,
so by the time I lay in bed,
I prepare for this fated, nightly, defeat.
I picture your friends
and suddenly their mine,
and your hands are tied around my neck as
my fingers begin to lose all sense and sign.
My feet press down on both sides at once
and losing control becomes personified.
But I don’t worry,
because it is you that guides me
back into the center of the lines,
where I stand alone under shaky city lights
that don’t exist in the back roads back home,
that don’t exist in the streets that watched
me collect all of the years that contain childhood.
These are cement lanes built by men
that chose to forget the colors of concrete
in favor of escaping the peculiar punishment
that is upheld morality.
No guiding sight exists in paths painted by people
who opted to turn off the lights.
Those streets I once knew
were built by men who would
rather pronounce their principles blind
than admit them dead.
They would choose this even if their life depended on it.
They would choose this even if their life was life defined by it.
In these dreams, the cement is smashed into
my tiny run down bit of metal,
which so violently makes the monster
of rusting mass go flying.
In this moment, the emptiness begins somehow
filling a void we can all see
as it slowly begins to consume its own self, endlessly.
The debree falls to the feet of our earth, crashing so quickly
that it flies right by the eyes of a god,
the one that watches from down below
where observance is free but his recognition a privilege
not granted to those so obsolete.
But don’t worry,
my hands stay so tightly wound around this steering wheel
that the tendons are turning white,
and I feel nothing at all.
Nothing in the slightest,
nothing but the grief that only burnt leather can lend
as it melts and molds to your wrists.
A scent of erosion and iron carefully untangles my fingers
and reaches for the end of my grip
where it rips quietly into my skin and makes
a home out of the caves behind ribs,
placing itself so perfectly that I am sure,
I will never forget.
And you promise me, like always,
you’ll be back tomorrow,
and the day after that,
and I won’t remember why I can’t get my hands off this steering wheel
and I won’t be able to recall why I am on this street.
Or better yet,
why it has become a mix of both you and me
and why my mind spends its time in sleep,
a place meant for peace,
writing horrific eulogies in honor of this memory.
My own voice wasn’t even convincing
the first time I tried to say
I left for me.



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