the space above my ears.

Dissonance

For the record, if for nothing else, I don't hate you anymore.

It's taken me a while, but I'm ready to speak to you without blurry eyes.

Please take a seat.

This is my disquisition on who you are and why you did the things you did.

It was meant to be affectionate, those envelopes you put in between the strings of the piano.

A substitute for a treaty signature; a peace offering.

All they did was make the music muffled and sour, though, so you failed.

I don't know why you wanted me to have them, but I never read them anyway.

I probably never will.

I still resent you for what you took from me in that backhanded attempt to wipe away the shadows under my eyes.

My blood still boils every time I hear that music; it has become innately sad because the instrument is broken.

That's your doing.

It only serves to remind me about those things that felt and tasted like Saturday, and now that it's Sunday, I don't want to remember better times.

I can't spell out my thoughts with the music anymore because you're still so here.

I do something that makes me look careless.

You respond by putting walls up between us.

Carelessly, I knock them down again.

You reinforce them, again and again, with more tar and Roman concrete every time.

I'm not going to say it was my fault.

I wasn't nice, but you never asked me to be.

Think about it;

If a man with cold, purple eyes walked up to you on the street and asked you where the line between good and evil was, could you answer?

You'd like to imagine you'd say something profound, something that has a resonating quality in and of itself.

Realistically, you would say that someone should have just given Cthulhu a hug.

That's what I find so ironic, how the things unspoken in theory are polar opposites of the things you end up making.

How you believe so strongly that to follow the will of that unnamed higher power is a suicide mission.

Open and objective, we hung those murals and passed that inked napkin around the room in silence.

This is not why I was bitter.

I was bitter because you doubted me.

The pilgrims adopted a new way of speaking.

A language where pleasure is sin, and years later I could hear it in your voice.

You followed the wrong hearse.

In return for all the angels did for you, you crumbled, gave yourself over to a fraud of a king.

Cut your eyes out so you couldn't read the script that told you love will wax and wane.

No second chances, you said, not for you.

It's not a metaphor, not some sugarcoated prototype.

You broke the rules.

In the dire circumstances, you were unabashedly willing to take things that weren't yours.

Not anymore.

It's over, so hold me.

Hold me and we'll take this world for our own.

We'll redesign it.

Make it mine, make it yours, make it the taxidermy of us together.

Call it real, call it surreal, call it something that gushes out a storm drain in a geyser of some man-made element.

What it's for has nothing to do with us or the creatures in the cabbage patch.

All it stands for, all it means is that this year's winter will not be green or white, but the color of hope.

It doesn't matter who or what you consider to be your muse.

It concerns only those who love you back.

It matters only your least proud moments.

The view of the sun from the bottom of the ocean.

Knives in tiny hinds,

Shame you may or may not feel depending on if you're on heaven's list at the gate.

There's a correlation, but we don't yet know who struck the first match and set the innocent witches aflame.

Nothing is more dangerous than fear.

Hurt is a close second.

Third is one's love for the taste of their own blood, or fingerprints on the edge of the white door.

Hiding, knowing, being aware of you own impending self destruction.

When you love someone on the inside, hate them on the outside, this is what you do.

You bury those cold t-shirts.

Bury them so they decompose and bloom into Venus flytraps before dying.

Hold your breath while they sink into the soil to fertilize the corpse flowers blooming alongside the barbed wire fences near the highway.

Winter will come, cars will crash, and eventually, you will have to forgive yourself.

But maybe now it won't have to be so colorless.

Now, some of the fight in you has been restored.

Come on, baby, we'll shake the chivalry right out of them.

This is us, sharing lungs.

This is us, with mouths frozen shut and plagued by the taste of melted skin.

This is us, starting over.