casual blasphemy

for the past four years
I’ve been in love with a boy
who’s too busy loving life to notice
I exist. I don’t think he’s ever seen me
past his tunnel vision living--

I’m in love with a boy who
wears black gauges and swears
he’s a deist who’s fed up with
the backwards-fucked system
that governs our lives; he talks to me
about the symbolic importance
of hunger and need and rebellion
and isolationism and death as
Orwell and Golding must have written it,

and, god, I just want to crack open
my ribs so he can see the literary
starvation destroying me, the not-quite
metaphoric devastation of my liver and
paper cuts scarring my heart. I want

him to talk to me about the reasons
we ought to avoid college
and capitalism and commitment and explain
to me what this all really means.

[I want to be so unflinchingly honest
with you that it will be as natural
and sinful as all the others
before, just without the glare
of bare skin and self-hate. I want to tell you

about the dam two miles out from my house
and how it calls to me nightly. I want to tell you
about the lake where I had my first kiss and
my first dive at loneliness and how it turns
inky black when you’re not watching.

I want you to know that I can’t cry anymore
as some broken time blocks my tear ducts,
and that I can’t even string a sentence up
properly without it fraying. I want you to know

I’m afraid of silence. I want you to realize
I can’t speak about myself without lying;
I don’t think you know how much
I don’t know. I don’t know why sometimes
when you stare at me I forget how to breathe
and speak like I know what I’m doing.

I don’t know what cosmic force keeps my heart beating
when my brain has stopped. I don’t know
how to forget, I don’t know where I’m going or
who I’m dragging with me. I don’t know
what political turmoil I’m stepping into,
or what parties to get trashed at, or
the difference between those two.
I want you to know I don’t know anything,

I’m not worth anything, but for
as long as I live, I will want
to know you.]