In the Flesh (2003)

You are not now what you were then on those
maddeningly slow summer days
when your bike too you
south to north to my house and back to
front to hip to thigh to
designs of space
catalytic
yet
needlessly anorexic,
apocalyptic scripts and song a
siren to
my 8th grade heart-
heartlessly distant becoming
resistant to your cancerous memorandum,
remembering your defective deflection of warmth
and
whatever else we once had to have to love this
screen of adulthood over the
flesh and fantasy beliefs
that I believed
and you deceived
and the tainted space between has bled
solidified, lied into the chains of
night from too much twisting of an unrequited fate
and
of late, the steel of 4am knows all my stolen secrets
and I think that you like to think you were the one
doing the stealing...

And years from how you were then to what you've
become now
I bow down to the secret that
the mind lies even as the flesh lies with mine
and it takes time to
turn away
around
down the offer
of a forever that flesh fire only cannot sire
because your mind is too worn down to respond
and even as you are gone
and I remain
to stake my claim on the memory of the
fumbling days and the way that you thought
that I should think I was too good for you to hold me
as I hold you down and sometime around
the line that you crossed I had the thought
that
the only time you did not lie
was when you and I
were in the flesh.

***PS: I don't think that poem makes a lot of sense. It has some really great lines, but I think I tried too hard to make it spoken word and lost the meaning sometimes. But it was a pivotal time in my life, so up it goes.