Anathema

What survived you isn't kind, but here I am.

I keep wondering what it would've been like
had we been different people.
Had I been someone my parents wanted
or a sexuality that people believed existed,
would things have changed?
"greedy" only seems to be in the shape of people who could never

Pick a side
she told me.
As if all the men I have loved
and all the men that I have hated
(which, if we're being honest, is most of them)
truly defined whether or not I could love a woman.

Bullshit.
As if my sexuality
- something she never believed in anyway –
had only two settings.

I can and I have loved so many wholeheartedly.
Four years of self hatred and denial does not define me
in the same way my name does.
They define me like the pen on the back of my hand that reminds me to set an alarm for tomorrow:
temporary.

But back to us.
Hypothetical, I know, but
what if you still thought of me?
- I know for a fact that you don't
but hope is a wonderful thing-

I suppose I just want you to know

you're not a permanent fixture anymore.
You are no longer the punchline,
to some joke I laugh at to feel better about myself,
to the joke I tell her when she asks about the boys I used to love
to see if hers were the same.

You are something,
a pastime perhaps,
what I think about when the past surges up
from the cesspit which I thrust it into.

Hey,
I think I've finally figured out the poem I was trying to write.

This isn't it.