We may never have
more circuses to
run away and join,
and I gave up
looking down to find
that shiny, lucky coin.
Our world may not
become what we both
expect it to.
But from this moment on,
if everything is lost,
I have you.
Tag Archives: love
To Be Read Aloud, but Maybe Not at My Funeral
I am attracted to
that which is bad for me.
Fried foods. Liquor.
A certain woman.
None of which are
actually bad, when used
as directed, although,
unlike fried foods
and liquor, a woman is
never to be used.
In the space between my heart
and my head, there is
a disconnect, wider than
the space that borders hell.
The space between my heart
and my imagined heaven.
It was never that a woman
was bad for me, it was that
I would not let go of
my own bad, first. Needed
to give that up, without
a certain woman strong enough
to take it all away.
And it has never true.
I mean the part about
the bad in me being taken
away, not the part about
a woman being strong,
and not the part about
my imagined heaven.
I think the closest thing
there is to my imagined
heaven is a woman,
a certain woman
who, if she could love me,
could love the bad in me,
and then it would not be
use, it would be share.
We could share
each other’s bad away.
But this is fiction, just like
my imagined heaven, and not
the space between my heart
and my head.
The space that borders hell.
Hundred-Eighty
Sometimes, I feel like
a hundred-eighty pounds
of feathers,
taking up more
space than weight.
A lighter kind of heavy than
a hundred-eighty pounds
of lead,
in the place where
my heart used to be.
Boyfriend
“Your boyfriend flirts hard,”Continue reading “Boyfriend”
he wanted to say.
“I don’t believe you,”
she would’ve replied.
“That’s okay,”
he kept thinking.
Everybody else does.
A Reason
One day I swear,
I will do all the things
you couldn’t bring yourself
to love like I did.
As if I’m gonna
need a reason,
but I remember
that one time, when I heard
you say that everyone should
love themselves
more than the one they
let break their heart.
A Brief Moment of Clarity
It’s about
someone you want
to wake up next to,
if you even slept
at all.
Poetry Slam Screamer
Everything is wrong.
The world is going to end
before I write a poem worthy of
the end of the world, and
that’s worse than when I had
cancer and found out about it
when I peed blood into my toilet
on the night Michelle Obama
gave her speech at the
Democratic National Convention.
Worse than when
the...
(REDACTED... for now)
...be happy forever, and
worse than when my first-born son
was given a death sentence,
less than an hour after drawing breath.
A poet’s inner monologue is trauma porn,
looking for an audience to suffer it with.
This isn’t the best poem
I ever wrote. It’s basically shit.
It’s true, but shit nonetheless.
And you need to know that
when I started writing this,
I had every intention for
better than some
fourth-runner-up-in-a-poetry-slam
screamer.
I apologize for that.
And if I ever read this
in a coffee house, or
lower-case-god forbid, on stage,
in the spotlight, I promise
to turn in my page poet card
on the way out the door.
At least I was right when
I said,
everything is wrong.
Lie to You
Today,
I would lie to you,
just to make you feel better.
Tomorrow,
I would tell you the truth,
for the same damn reason.
Both of these are probably love.
Some day,
I hope you’ll do
the same for me.
Proletariat Kinks
If we could burn the world down
together, would that make us a match
made in hell?
And will you only want me when
things get hot, or is it that you
can’t stand seeing the world on fire,
all alone?
I know the likelihood of these being
answers on a dating profile are about
as slim-to-none as us actually
burning anything down,
together or apart, but I think,
as questions go, they’re more important
than what we want to eat on
our first date.
Questions which, should we ask them,
might make our first date,
our last.
I’m not unstable, I swear. No more
than any other high-functioning anarchist,
living in a world where life is measured
paycheck-to-paycheck,
and death, in how soon we finish
grieving, and get back to measuring
paychecks. Maybe if Soylent Green
was billionaires.
But until that dream is real, maybe
we could start by striking that match,
lighting some candles, and talking about
our proletariat kinks.
Mine involve a double scoop of
chocolate ice cream, served at a parade,
on the first day of May.
Time Travel Isn’t Real
A long story, a lot shorter.
There’s a line that goes,
you can love someone and know
you’re not supposed to be with them.
And there’s another line that goes,
you can know you’re not supposed to be
with them, and still love someone.
I think that’s worse.
Read it again. I’ll wait.
The way the word, MELANCHOLY,
is worse than I thought it was
before I Googled it. Shit.
Worse. Apt, but worse.
The way I’ve become a cliché is worse.
Maybe I should Google the word CLICHÉ,
but that might be a bad idea, because
MELANCHOLY.
Yep, it was worse.
Don’t read that again. Just don’t.
There’s a line that goes,
you can do ninety-nine things right,
and one thing wrong.
I fell in love. That wasn’t
the one thing. I’ll never know
what the one thing was.
Now I think that’s worse. Fuck.
ShitFuckFuckShitFuck. Just fuck.
And I wish time travel was real.
Time travel isn’t real. Fuck.
William S. Friday 