No,
stop,
don’t trust me
don’t love me
don’t forgive what I’ve told you I’ve done
Without stopping to think
What I haven’t told you.

Do I need to scream sinful details
into your ears
before you’ll hate me!?!

Go on then,
loathe me
ignore me.
Chant those names you want to call me
in your head, every time I’m near you.
Please.

Don’t listen when I try to tell you I’m doing better
in a desperate attempt
to get one more drop of love
out of this crumpling upside-down
off-brand soda can
that I’m coming to call our friendship.

Don’t look up to me
With thoughts that glare
off the empty glass of my heart.
lest they get back to your innocently curved pupils
and make you think my heart emits a kind of light.

Don’t take my feeble
self-denying attempts at staying happy
for a message in a bottle
telling you that some philosophical poet-genius,
Singer-songwriter, master craftsman, lover,
is hiding on an island of loneliness
waiting for your love to bring him back
to the civilized metropolis
that you call happiness.

He’s not.
Not waiting alone
talking to some piece of sports equipment-
metaphor for the human condition.

He’s trapped, in a dark room,
in the back of my mind
writing pleas for help
on the back of scripted love-lines
that my selfishness is forcing him to write
and then re-write
in pursuit of the next victim
of my loneliness.

When I tell you my sins
it’s not me bragging
about the sins I’ve committed
so you feel bad
for never leaving your comfort zone
long enough to give yourself
a reason not to love yourself anymore.

It’s a confession-booth love song
where I tell you my wrongs
so you can re-write the lyrics
into something better.

Let me love something,
for once in my life,
that I can’t get just by
spelling love on the back of your hand
In forty-two point Italic font
with a pen whose ink
is made of false tears and imitation art.

Give me something to love
that I’ll have to free
that broom-closet poet
in order to get.

And let him spread his sails
and guide my soda-can,
lovesick, wordsmith ship
“the loneliness”
back to land.

Let me land
on the island of your heart
as a poet whose demons drown en route
but whose words haven’t stopped flowing
as fast as  they did
when the only light he saw
was the dying embers of a heart
in a little glass box
inside of a mousetrap, canary-cage mind.

Let me build bonfire-poetry
on the beach of your heart.
and sing love songs
with your palm-tree quirks.
While we toss carefully-branded
sunset-syrup, glass bottles
out into the ocean.

Bottles filled with notes
that have quotes on them.
Floating off into nowhere
To find the others like us.
Who are lost.
Bringing them back home.

Notes that say things like:

“don’t
stop
Loving,”

“Trust yourself,”

“Love
Yourself,”

“Forgive yourself,
damn you”

And,
“unlock that broom closet...”