hands

i cut off my hair. you have never touched the strands that graze my chin & even my chin is free of the peppery bits you used to pull with such careful intensity & i erase you more & more & more. i mark up my body in new ways you’ve never seen & never will & i, i miss you still & i love you still & i think about pounding my fists against your chest & screaming why? why? why? until my voice gives out & i break down like i’m fourteen jumping into a bonfire, making such a scene my friends abandon me, recruit their very own enemies in my stead, my void. but i know all it will do is bruise my own fists. & i dance now to the music that speaks to my hips, speaks to my ass & the jiggle of thigh the way your music never reached me, never could, because it was just the grinding of metal forks into asphalt & tinkling bells & no words that spoke to the need to be set free. maybe i’ll breathe again. & maybe someone else’s breath will smell like sugar to me again one day, but not yet. i’m not ready yet. but i do like the hands. all bakery & molasses. & when they brush my throat, i don’t cringe, my breath doesn’t catch, it pours, all hot fudge onto my icy, creamy flesh. he doesn’t make me scared. he doesn’t turn the floor to lava or the conversation to bear traps. i think he thinks that i think it’s more than it is but i’m just grateful for the hands. i’m not ready for more than hands. palms. fingertips & waking up. i think he thinks that i think he could love me, but i am not so foolish, despite what my past may say. & i think you think that i think you loved me once, but i am not so foolish. see, there’s a lot i desire & i can pretend my desires are true for an awful long time. did you know i won the most in character award two years in a row?  i’m far more delusional & i’m far more talented than i let on because why would i give you more to take away, to suck up like a pool vacuum, sweeping up debris & bits of crumbled chlorine? i was never lonelier than touching myself next to your sleeping body in your bed as my tears soaked through your pillow wondering if i could slip out your door & into the night without shifting you awake. now who could love a dust bunny? a windswept anthill? the dandelion already blown out? i’m recollecting all the fuzz. doing backwards somersaults til i become yellow again. don’t rip me from my roots. i am not a weed. you hate my bright, my abundance. so i dulled, i thinned. my belly is plump again, my sunflower eyes alight. there is purpose in my unevolution, re-evolution, my revolution. & again i stand under the shower, the man made absolution. healing in motion. backwards is still a direction & the circle makes it forward. i’ve been to the place where the trains turn around. & i haven’t screamed in months & i haven’t wanted to rip my flesh from my bones so why then do i miss you? it wasn’t even you. just a projection. injection, deflection. i don’t need to numb myself because the feelings are no longer spike strips & chaos. i don’t have to beg to be seen. my face looks different but that’s okay. because i am loved in ways i never could have been when holed up in a corner bedroom watching you beat my animated corpse to fatality again & again & again. flawless victory. i donated all my clothes & cut off all my hair & the cells are replacing themselves until one day you’ll never have laid hands on me at all.