So we aren’t stopping rest stops they just keep on glowing neon ears accelerating past white lines It’s a beautiful saying, all is fair in what you provoke me by I am clenching the metal souvenirs with my fingernails and I imagine you painting me in bitter toned oils all over my hands and elbows stroking my eyelashes with your lips 

I’m bending to that door arbitrarily asking you to ask me for whatever it is that holds me back from that conversation I ran through the scenarios in my head before comfortable sleep me begging you and you begging me to stop and I muffled my only voice through the ease of shelter in the form of a dormitory cot.

I found that the only wealth I had gained in your absence was solitude; it’s not enough They told you that your value is, was, had been denoted by your class, your standing, your size, your walk – you walk like a prick, begging for harmony and seething with apprehension

And you assumed the only way to end this world’s contention against you was between the statuesque burnished poise of the bottle, floating from all rationale and me and you seized it like you would a pretty girl dressed fashionably in a face that expresses no thought I imagined your life, luggage, packed in a shoe box and guitar case and still I crumple like paper, disfigured as your notion that this place would swallow your energy, recycle you into white currents of prescriptions and diagnoses and meds and pills and I stood there shuffling my returns in your drunken disarray wanting you to be just okay  

When you told me you wanted to die
I made a grocery list.