An ode to a friend I once knew

Sometimes I get tired of not pretending. Sometimes goodbye isn’t the correct gesture; sometimes
fuck off is all I mean. This one time back in second grade, I remember this guy who punched me in
the face and almost stabbed my hand with his pencil. Kissing you reminded me of that, unhealthy
and will probably result in damages, but it's okay, bring on the facial scars and the lead poisoning.
Not the best anomaly, I know. Maybe I’m just creatively bankrupt to come up with a solution, but
whatever. To be honest, I’ve been thinking about a lot of things these days. I wonder where does
home emerge and if I should leave probably I should bury the old me in the backyard of the place
where I once stayed. I’ve been thinking about locking myself up; inside a box locked in a dark room
inside an abandoned house in an empty corner of the street in a city void in debauchery. And I
grieve, I grieve knowing id still be there, isolated. And isolation isn’t a device, its death. If no one
knows that you’re alive probably you aren’t. And I still have half a beer left in my refrigerator and I
still haven’t reached the climax of Schindler’s List (I’m a suck ass, geez, I know) and to be honest, if
you wanna start worrying, right now would probably be the best time. All I wanna do is break it
down to you, convince you that it wasn’t worthless, the poems, and the bookstores, none of it. I lock
my arms in the subtle cacophonies of the nightlife, obscure; I run out of lips to kiss and mouths to
talk, about reindeers and rainbows, the weather back home, the trees, the lives, and the planets. It’s
a slow inconvenience now, transitioning out of place, as I watch it grow like a tumor under my skin.
Like a gramophone in a bombed city, hoping one day we could talk some more.

I wrote this one at a vulnerable painful time in my life and yet today as I heard about the loss of a friend I once secretly loved, I couldn't help but imagine how it would have meant if I could've mustered the courage to tell her how invariably pretty I found her to be on days.