When the litany left your cherry-stained lips did you even believe it

We ate peaches in your car as summer killed itself and whittled down the sun outside into a sharp

autumn point

I was thinking that you looked like a renaissance painting and every finger was a holy brush

parked under the singing leaves of the oaks and splitting the difference between the two

white lines we lay together eating strawberries and the seeds were your tongue like the bitter

juice of a sugar-dipped lemon once you get to its core

You’re the worst person I've ever had the misfortune to meet.

I can't help this paradox.

I've told you this before.

Here is the imagined life and your golden skin framed as a sculpture and every vein has been

chiseled a thousand times under your skin—I know this, I was there—

Here is the telephone pole bent over, touching the ground (I never thought wood could bend that

way) and your outline in white chalk on the sidewalk and you’re bleeding everywhere, drinking

cherry juice off the tarmac—

the problem is that I think of sweet fruit and I think of you and I think of knives and car

accidents and I think of you

and you act as a broken limb and the splint and when your fingers cracked I saw the bone

sticking out and was reminded of the last parking space you ever saw

and how you basically went up in flames after that,

but when I said the word smoke you thought about weed and I thought about how wildfires look

after they’ve all burned themselves out and left nothing but hollow ashtrays in bone-dried valleys

where there used to be forests,

and here is the biggest contradiction, paradox—

I can never be you and you can never be me

It's really as simple as that.

You’ve only ever known how to be a vessel for opposites.

I've only ever known how to try and love somebody like you.