I should have killed myself a long time ago
The moment we met
was clarifying beyond comprehension
—oxymoronic though that statement seems—
that everything I’d been
before you was comedy,
while everything I’d be after equals tragedy
How am I to go on pretending
—now having looked you in the deepening—
that I was ever anything more
than some obsessive, supporting role
in your bejeweled chaos?
I sought to give you second sight,
but I’ll be lucky to give you
lackadaisical leftovers;
forever seeking any meager scrap of purpose
beyond the way you leave me feeling
…
yet never finding it
I should have written you a love song,
and accepted that was the most
I’d ever amount to
Perhaps, under those circumstances,
upon my gravestone, they’d proclaim,
“Here lies a man smart enough to know
that all men are essentially insufferable.”
And the fact that my last thought was of you
would stay as hidden and unconsidered
as the rest of this book
—which may as well
have your common name on the cover—
would then have been