I mourn you like the loss of this poem after it is finished.
When the subway came in, puddles darkening on my jacket
as they squelched beneath my rainboots, a man sitting near me
asked why I still loved you- I said you are the only thing
that has been with me my whole life. Eighteen already.
In the hotel room the coffee maker gurgles like a hungry stomach
as someone in the next room makes a sound that could be
either fabulous sex, a dying breath, asthma, or all three.
You make me do things in hotels like sneak down to the laundry room
and steal old peoples’ underwear with unidentified stains,
or try to drown myself in the outside pool where children
in sagging bathing suits and dark tans think I’m just taking a breather.
On the worst days, when you wake up next to me
when all I want is to sleep alone, I cry at weddings and laugh at bombings.
I am so old. There are wrinkles in bones I didn’t even know existed,
when even windowpanes want to escape my presence.
On our shared birthday cake, you blow out every candle
I actually succeeded in lighting- to imagine a life without you
is almost as bad as imagining a life with you.
God, you always play on loop.
If only someone would press the stop button on the machine.
I finally understand why war veterans sleep with bullets
under their pillows: happy birthday, but if you came to me in a dream,
I would shoot you dead.