Algebra.

please forgive my absence now, and in the math and the life and the glow and shock and all that comes with the after. if ever counts for anything, please forgive me for that first since never again will you have to wonder whatever happened to that one girl who always seemed to stick to the floorboards when the before had passed and now it makes sense how her words and the absurd seemed to fall so freely from her lips and how you miss her absence in the happily-ever-after scene on loop and unable to keep you from blinking back tears that get stuck in the space just behind your eyelids now. it startles me to find you hiding somewhere unlikely in my nest of frayed nerve-endings and neurons mis-firing constantly and darting around and tangled up in me you sit there lazy sunday and summer seemed much better this year if only for your cryptic questions left to hang me in your boneyard of miscalculated risks and doomed but amusing company of summers and couches and new sheets meant to hang on the line like me all soaking wet with you and your back as you turn it uncaring and telling me more than your glory day sob stories and revealing more still than your blinking and pausing and lying eyes winking and so it turned out that when i turned to go all that was lost on your back and your welcome mat were the words and the what and the why of me and that's just who you never again may look in the eye. and in lieu of my mess and display of spectacular disaster on any given day in every split end on this mop atop my head afixed to scalp shreds of which remain long after i've left perhaps for good this time tangled and remembering

what is what now that september reminds us to scatter and patch together our plans hammered out and nails on a chalkboard

my voice is truly like cracked sidewalks i skip when i remember to sometimes blindsided by chalk drawings and errant bird feathers like omens to me

of autumn and crunching leaves for the rush of it maybe a bit morbid but i might as well dance as long as i can see the forest in spite of the trees and naked branches like women who shiver at the thought of november and new york and alone maybe where i went wrong

a rake and a cup of kid gloves could have should have but would have been wasted on such a glib little thing as i was not meant for sing-alongs and take-away lessons like morals of stories i never could bite back the cynic but tried till my lips were left crusted bloody and i was given a dirty look or two in my day before it was all said and done and i was one of the lucky ones

who went missing before i might have otherwise went on to hover around borderlines of myself and instead of dancing between genius and insanity perhaps i made more mountains inside the molehills of my mind when i climbed out from underneath your idea of what i was like and got high on some guy's lap on some otherwise mind-numbingly ordinary tuesday night in the buckle of some state they equate with the belt of the bible, i know well after i tried that on for size and it might look more right now that i have more life under my own belt perhaps its just not meant for people like me to take pride or find comfort in knowing that in spite of the spiderweb feeling like sticky uncertain and dirty and knowing

i walked right into this eyes open and willing and still i find myself shivering with skin crawling i try to think outside the lines and remind my reason and logic that somewhere tonight, even, there must be some like-minded creature who has been here and won't mind me stepping on toes of footprints tracked through the snow over more time than i could find icicles to lick into puddles of delicious remainders of what tried to fall but just couldn't re-trace as well the path of those others who came this way first but froze up like i might have under circumstances and had i known what came to light long after i was in the red and up on top and had yet to find

the truth about choices and naked seeds and branches left without leaves don't mind because they can't afford to believe in second chances or like i could never find buttons to push inside calculators of me that signaled the way off stage and out of my mind long enough to get through the web i was meant to weave through all of this and let you fall through my dazed fingertips still snapping up bits of what summer left before the first frosty morning broke off tips of split ends and grass blades cracked in half like we could be seen doing if you ever did look

i wish i never did stop blinking back spots and red marks from what blinded me back then when i could buy more than enough for you to hold in lieu of my lost and found pride or something like i later heard i ought to have held on to tightly but chose to avoid conversations with night after night in hunched over stances i can still shake my head at the blurry lines between things i thought were my eyes being honest and lies i told myself outside the margins like some kind of aside to assure myself of what,

i still don't know.