I am coming to see you,
confront you.
You with your spiny back pushed against the gag-worthy beige garage.
You in all of your sickly and plump beigeness.

I don't want to look in your eyes;
prepubescent and so so naïve that I couldn't have possibly known about
repercussions yet.

I hope that your vertebrae bruised that day
and I regret not pushing you away harder,
harder into the plastic shutters.
You plague my mind in such a horrible, nightmare-inducing way.

So young, and so ripe,
like the freshly picked crabapples that sat rotting in my front yard.
they had to go.

So did you but you never really left.

I don't remember your lips on mine,
thank god,
but i imagine that you were like biting into cheap chapstick,
a whole mouthful of a wax figure,
looking real and feeling fake.

You have made me uncomfortable in my own body,
nervous to look at people or their mouths.
I cannot see between the lies that their spiders spin,
you have clouded my vision with ammonium gas
and I choke for air
because I cannot breathe and neither should you.

Why did you deserve to take the words from my mouth, the defense from my body, the security from my conscious?
How dare you replace it with an ocean, but there is nothing as salty or as frequently quenched as my eyes on that night in the street with our bikes and the grills sitting ablaze in my driveway.

You had cyanide eyes that sneered at me because I wouldn't dance for you.

I wouldn't let you embarrass me again, just like you did every summer when we swam in the thunder storms and firehoses that stung like a heavy hand on my cheek.

Just like you did when we were alone in your backyard, pressed up against your garage amongst the summer haze that hid it's rising breasts behind the gray shelter of clouds.
the nonexistant ones.
Such a rotten idea – it might've been my own.

It is an occurrence that haunts my thoughts so many times a week that i can't picture it being anything other than barely lethal.
I cannot speak of you without disgust in my chest and bile in my throat.

What eternal ghost has possessed me to behave in such a manner? It is you, following like halloween, still not having realized how unwanted you are and the degree to which you have burned me.

It is a scarring happening, a heat blister that I let sit and fester under the summer sun's harsh rays.
I may not remember but I can still taste the venom that dripped from your mouth to mine.