This is not a love poem
because i fucking hate your guts
I practice cutting my hair with my back to the mirror so I can learn
how to remove something meaningful without watching it go,
just like I tried to do with you so many months before.
Ironic how I spent the whole autumn writing poems about you
just for winter to come and freeze everything over.
During the dark nights of the solstice hitchhiking was my only solace
because inviting my way into strangers' cars
was better than going back to that familiar place
somewhere approximately 30 degrees between my left lung
and the clearest contours of my heart
where missing someone that wasn't good for me felt like home.
Maybe in a past life I picked scabs until they bled
and formed more scabs inside the old ones like Matryoshka dolls.
Maybe in a past life you were just another wound
I had to pretend not to notice since it wouldn't heal properly.
Maybe in a past life these wouldn't be angry poems;
maybe they'd be love poems instead.
But reincarnation doesn't change a thing when all possible lives
lead back to love and betrayal somehow.
If I believed in it, though, I'd wish to come back as
the right hemisphere of someone else's brain
because at least then I wouldn't have to think about you anymore.
