lying awake

Our lives are the accumulation of dignified memories.

We lie to our children and we lie to each other, but we still feel that we deserve to feed on the breasts of voluptuous angels, to suckle their plump white bosoms and hungrily devour the rich fat creamy milk of divine heavenly cows that offer salvation from life’s measly pittance.

We suck the teets of our angels, and their grotesque greasy immaternal smiles infuse us with unsated gluttony.

An unresponsive evil always lurked in your embrace, yet you ask forgiveness from those you have smitten. Rest your temperance in flames of spite. When they proclaim that compassion is a weakness that crumples like so many cardboard slums that heroically shelter the poor and unwanted of our brethren, I will be the first they come for, but you won’t even remember me.

I’ll be the backward eyes of dreams that have never risen to claim lucid skies.

I fell once into forgiveness even as you stood by me and claimed your prize. In faith I felt I belonged to something more, something grand, but it was just the echo of redacted allegory flung at me by a posse of wayward prophets that left me grasping at blind instances of repressed and disremembered shame. I let go finally, incredibly, and the plunge felt deep — even, at times, meaningful.

Sometimes I look at my own face and think that if you were near me, I would somehow remember everything. All the indignities of our lives would come flowing back to me, and they would somehow unite to fill our past discord with the former promise of all our forgotten hopes.

Sometimes I think there only ever was us two, but then I forget, and time claims its pound of flesh before I can even repent.

Sometimes I even miss you.