Matters of Consequence

You have always been unsure of yourself

Let me tell you what you are

You are a failure

You are an irritation. You are an itch

You are the scratch on the record that interrupts the best song

You are a pale imitation

You are a pest, and an embarrassment, and a wisp of smoke from the end of my cigarette that makes my eye water at parties

You are the weakest beam in a crumbling building

You are the crumbling building between our middle-class apartments

You are a bad dream

You are the terrible narrator of my nightmares

You are the monster on top of my bed

You are the gum under my shoe and the gun in my father's hand

You are a child. You are your mother

You are every crack in the sidewalk that breaks her back

You are every nail in the coffin, you are the worms in the dirt

You are the unknown variable in the equation

You are the X I don't want to find

You said I walked away from you,

we both know that I crawled

I dragged myself away from you

And when the dredges of remembrance and damning nostalgia trailed loose behind me like the bloody straggles of a torn-off limb,

I picked myself up and I ran from you

Fuck you