My mother drove a white pickup truck.
In summer, she let Coral and I ride in the bed.
Coral waving at the street boys, while I watched behind heart-shaped glasses.
All the greatest loves of my life are born in spur of the moment,
by some mundane act.
And they die a tragic death.
I’ll tell you that every day is the Ides of March,
but I am the architect of my own tragedies.
A raving blue flag.
I fly at half-mast,
and all my lines have fallen in unpleasant places.

There’s a crystal ball on my nightstand but it tells a tale as old as time:
That I had grown restless in your house.
You’re arguing with the girl from your birthday party that owls are flying cats,
and there’s a dead weight on my chest, a riddling rage.
I walk out your door but right back into your living room,
and you draw me in like I never left, without breaking stride.
And this incongruity, it is puzzling.
I know that nothing has ever been mine;
Not even my rage, it is my father’s.
That I could never leave.
But the things that thrive on my sole proprietorship, they die a horrible death.
Isn’t it poetic that the things that make up a living thing aren’t living?
Make me laugh so I don’t hear the cortege.
Tell me the joke about the pastor, the pasta, and the politician.
Drive me to Calvary and leave before the rooster crows.
I lie in wait in my tomb, curled in a shape moulded for me,
utterly harmless at first glance.
Here comes a new visitor to the tomb. ‘Will you lend me a hand?’

‘No, I am not an angel.’

‘Will you blow out the dirt from my eyes?’

‘Yes, I will follow you to Samarra.’

I can be your claque; I know this play like I know your fingers, your sweat,
your day-old shirt with the lingering smell of cigarette.
There’s a black hole in my chest and it is swallowing me whole.
But oh, everything’s so bright in the beginning.

Walk with me, in gravel, on fresh snow, and if you dare, through my valley of shadow of death.
All these withered wildflowers are my doing.
Doodle my name on scrap paper and scorch it with the end of your blunt.
All these ashes are my repentance.
Do you know the greatest losses of my life have been eclipsed by something so banal so I haven’t mourned in years?
Colour me a maudlin mauve.
All the poets are weary of me.
They whisper that I am lucky enough to stitch the hem of my misery.
But what I am given, I trifle with.
I lie in the embrace of men with names I do not know,
whose faces I could not pick in a crowd.
And in that transience, I find that to love is to trade.
Here, have me, tonight and tomorrow, if only you promise to stay—to remember me.
I make dinner plans with unsaved numbers, and I lie through my teeth.
I leave trinkets in strangers’ cars, and wait their calls.
Oh, I’m so clever, I’m a lab rat chasing my tail.
When will I learn? 

Do you not yet have an understanding?
History is littered with ghosts of me, and we’re all paralysed in momentary tragedies. I have never left. I have sacrificed souls on each resurrection, and I am a waning thing. My ghosts abhor me; they will never be buried in hallowed ground. We will traipse this life, trailing imaginary slights behind us; they mark the landmarks of my despair. They file like toy soldiers behind me, standing in the rubble of my destruction, waiting to be dismissed. I hold them hostage because I have been warned innumerably that I shall end up alone. And they curse me at night, yet I brook no release. Forgive me my trespasses.
Coral said I haven’t changed much.
That when I regress, I’m a 12-year-old curled in the corner on the floor sulking and sucking my thumb;
I’m 19, crying till my nose bleeds, afraid that when I die, I’ll not be found;
And I’m 24, still begging to be remembered.

Dear lord—Are my best years still ahead of me,
or is my appointment in Samarra?
I am fickle, yes, this is my Inferno, but help.
I want to live till all my markers of time are indecipherable.
This life, my cup,
I’d like that it overflows,
spills past its boundaries, seeps into cracks on the ground time cannot reach,
its roots multiplying like bamboo under concrete.
I shall never have Coral back.
So I must live on, however ghostly,
leaving multiple iterations, in different faces,
till the things that have plagued me, feel like scenes from another life.

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