No Take Backs (audio)

Wracked with disease of a sort I cannot quite identify, I squeeze my eyes shut and try to imagine it coursing through my veins, running its liquid venom up and down inside my silky limbs. When you write, do you think of a specific person and write to them as though you were sitting alone together in a coffee shop somewhere? Or do you write mainly to yourself and hope to holy hell it resonates for anyone else?

I was reading my older pieces last night and noticed a beauty I hadn’t really grasped was present all those years ago. I guess it’s true what they say when they say you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. It matters though, I think, if it was stolen from you or you gave it up willingly. It was something in the words, some kind of hopeful serenity which slid through the thread of thoughts like a soft smooth undercurrent.

Thinking about it now, it is the hopefulness, the gentleness of it which is suddenly most alarming, most disturbing. You live through the days and fuck around doing whatever you do at night and then years and years go by before you realize that times have changed and changed dramatically. Typing out poetry like your fingers grip white-knuckled against the edge of the cliff you can’t remember how you got yourself dangling from.

There were times, there were moments which were all our own, all of our own design. Before everything was a meme or a filter or something you could buy and sell and trade and bastardize for the masses. I remember my first cigarette which I smoked with an older boy at the playground behind the public elementary school. I remember walking there with him in the dead cold of a gray winter afternoon, my tiny body trembling with cold and the excitement you can only feel when you are young and know absolutely nothing about the world or how to fit your awkward self into it without embarrassment or obsessive fascination.

I caught his big brown beautiful eyes staring into mine as the lighter flared between us like the sudden flash of a shooting star. That moment is etched into my memory as though I could reach out and touch him even now. I can still feel the delicious clutch of hot stinging smoke against my innocence, taste the nicotine as my tiny blonde head floated high above the both of us. I laughed at his amateur words as though they were the cleverest, funniest words I had ever heard. Thinking all my life I would get to do so many magical things. Thinking that that was just the beginning when little did I know it was the end of something special you can’t get back no matter how hard you try.