standing up straight in my own mind and how i imagine myself much less real and nervous than my crooked spine, finally showing the strain of the burden borne of years and skin meant to protect but now it's just left with what i've done to it destruction in everything i've ever done that amounted to anything worthwhile or something worth jumping for a jumping-off launching pad point in time and stenciled airbrushed perhaps, with cans of air and eliptical pieces of shrinking bones and dehydrated wounds shrunk into themselves like irises in winter and still, in spite of myself and these fingernails crusted hinting at blood baths and other things i've drawn from within me and for you still. i will try harder next time, i pray for you and me and the time just after this one. if not this, then maybe words will suffice as proof for you and your parents. forgive me for mentioning them too. i understand how hurt sometimes runs down the crook of your elbows and when it hits the linoleum the asphalt or the sky below your shape it takes you by suprise, sometimes. like your flared corners and sharp angles and wet towels and how you left them unglorious pieces of feathers you could care less about if they were in your cap or your toenail clippings underfoot in the hotel room that you called crappy as if i didn't remember your house on the bottom of the hill or as if i even noticed the background noise static clinging to your outline in the dark that night as if it would have made any bit of matter to me right then or now. and i know you too well, it's a shame you never let me brag about it but sometimes i wonder how your parents would take to me and i already know the answer and still. it matters less with every eyelash i rub away from the time i spent tied to the bed when you made it clear what this was and what it was not. and still is, in certain corners of the world it seems.