Mazes

Kills hunger like a punch to the gut…
just that it’s not a blow, not even a touch.
It’s a presence that I get reminded of
when the damn nostalgia kicks on.
It could be anything. A scent, a sunset,
a breeze, a word, a wave, a tear; anything.
It could also be something I’ve never met
and yet it sends my self loathe spiraling.

I could just look out the window, see nothing.
Just random clouds barely like those from a memory
or stars aligning like they did from a night ages ago,
and that’d be all it takes to set me off this reality.
And I’d go floating across frozen time, in my head;
could be gone for weeks, rerunning stuff in there
but be back only a minute later, on the clock
with the worst kind of airsickness, from dissociation.

I’d turn to books for worlds to lose myself in and
I’d find you in there, waiting for me patiently,
picking verses to ambush me on, off the sands
of disintegrating quotes, giving way, aesthetically
collapsing into the light between the pages, where
spans a fragrantly bitter, bright cold, a space without
end which can only be traversed in willful thought, &
the only way out is to remind myself to run from you.

I’d try to douse myself in music and forget
to breathe but all the bastards seem to have
had sung of you, and a lonesome sigh sparks
labored slavery to breaths & miss hearing yours.
Perhaps travel could help unravel this misery,
I think to myself, as I run through borders
& over mountains & into jungles & volcanoes
only to run into you again, in every little pause.

Art too, the greatest distraction there was, fails.
Point my lens at nothing but I still search for you
when I click it on and zone out to peer through.
All my brushes puke the pastels and violets and
go frigid in dejection of anything but your skintone.
My feet find no place, my hands home no grace
to sway, even a bit, to a tune, without your embrace.
& my kilns & ovens go cold as my heart, with no heart.

So I’d seek refuge at the only remaining asylum:
in my poems, my harbor from this great morose,
the only place that you get what you deserve in
the way you don’t; where I’d keep you from worlds
I’ve built for you in ink & tears and gales untold,
from your castles, your gold, the truth & thrones
of confession but I have no solace here either,
for I’m stuck outside all these walls, right by you.

So where do I go? How do I break out of my head?
How do I let you go without letting myself go too?
When do I get to be free again, without fragments
of you sticking to my psyche like broken mirrors
in mosaics from shitty escape-rooms housing you
in every look I take back at all that I have warmth in?
What would it take for you to leave me alone?
What would it take for me to leave me alone?