why do i allow myself to participate in something as dangerously stupid as Love?

allow myself to participate

i say

as if i don’t

put myself up to bat

in a room full of automatic pitch machines

Love looks at me

like the cracks in the sidewalk look at your mother

Love stares at me like a little boy

about to break his arm on a trampoline

like he’s so excited

to jump; to feel high; to feel something

other than earth’s gravity

only for earth to pull him back down

and remind him that trying to feel something different

can be fucking painful

Love sounds

to me

like a voice crack in a crying man

like out of tune electric guitars

like car alarms

that won’t turn off

like Fran Drescher’s voice

and it smells like burning toast on a mom and dad want a divorce type of morning

Love screams

at me through four windows rolled down in january

two hands gripping more than a heavy wheel

and i scream back at her

with a mix between the oxford and urban dictionaries

to let her know i still exist

Love is

in the cashier’s voice that kinda sounded like yours

that probably didn’t sound like yours

but i heard it anyways

She’s in every rearview mirror’s backseat

and every side eye’s almost saw something that was never really there

She sees what i never did in you

or maybe doesn’t see

what i really saw in you

Love comes back to you

even after you makeout with her best friend

She finds you

even when you curse her out and tell her never to come back,

Love,

just spent her last dollars

on wine to help her write about you

and whiskey to help her forget about you

She wakes up every morning with the taste of you still bitter on her tongue

and the feeling of you still fresh in her stomach

to her, you look like the toilet bowl last night

and you look like her notebook’s last page

and you look like her wet, freshly reddened cheeks and dripping nose

and you look like her favorite poem she’s ever written

and you look like her most hated poem she’s ever written

and you look like the worn letters on her backspace key

and you look like her

and you look like her

Love is more in love with you than i am with her

and i have been chasing her since she took my money

and my poems and my sobriety and ran

and I have been out of breath since

she gave them all to you