I won’t show you mine

since I know what’s happening to yours.

I can’t win the game when

you one-up-me with dead relatives.

 

And no–one can do this job. No–

one can do this. I ask a question

you avoid: sex, drugs, fresh compliments,

and hobbies, anything but

 

truth is cliche, passe, pessimistic

smoke clouding my judgement,

persistent and consistent

fights against the hold of what was held.

 

Always inevitable, always tragic.

Always predictable untimely magic.

Always deniable, though we’ve all had it.

Familiar faces are the ones that blacken.

 

so I become more unfamiliar, immaterial,

more complacent instead of ethereal,

more absent than present,

more sardonic instead of cathartic.

 

We’re another longing to be unsmothered.

so I am the other,

but each of us a thing one

another can not believe in.