February 24, 2003 - 7:49 p.m.
Our Retrospective
Your lips screamed �I don�t know you anymore�
Unaccustomed to mine, they missed the feeling of familiar.
Soaking in the sour fluid of our year, we trace the story of our sweet decay
To proof where it still seems unclear.
Where does the end of the world begin and how did conviction unravel here?
Ask some, and they will tell you
Cheerfully, �yeah, she�s a bitch. It was all her you see�-
Selfishly destroying the one person who ever knew her worth,
Sweating stains of regret upon the whole we once perceived.
Smiling now they seem relieved.
The value of you and I they capsize
With each judgement thrown by assessing eyes.
They know what they see, your tears and my retreat,
To a happier place- they fabricate.
Whose trial is this, mine or ours? I know I�ve been accounted for.
Their reportage tracks my digressions rapturously,
My life; A living metaphor. Make me Lilith,
Discontented to lie beneath,
So couple me with the burden of beasts,
The weight of your hetero-expectations.
I tell you I feel hunted, you say you feel sad.
You tell me they don�t care that much,
I say, you know, I wish they had�
Cared enough not to tamper, cause their not caring
Is enough to put a damper-
On any reconciliation we may have seen,
And supplant the memory of what we had been
With stories of betrayal, when the real breach happened
All in my head, where the water of my weakness
Made me bend and cry bitterly instead.
I held tight, grabbing helpless with both hands,
Trying to hold up
All the pieces of me that were falling away, and losing ground
To the desire I doused with kerosene each day
that I pretended my desire might just go away.
Doubt destroyed me, and ripped me into a useless array
Of pieces that you recognized but could not arrange.
What do you say
when they bring you my laundry?
You answer �I don�t know�.
Your �I don�t know� is an affliction I cannot undo
It defiles us far deeper than my uncertainty knew how to-
You tell me I stopped trying,
But no word can shake my regard
I hold you up eternally, safe against any verdict but ours.
Never have I failed us, like the silence that you choke on
The truth of your repair submerged, I�ve been labeled the contagion.
I applied myself to the wounds you bore from days before I knew their cause.
Between my palms, I braved your tears. I cradled you against my chest and
Now my name is painted there, the canker in your flesh.
My body as your ointment, my pain divulged for your redemption.
I revealed myself over and again, open as proof that scars can be built on.
This story is blind, and the piper has gone,
Leading mice at a wayward pace, to abandon their other senses, like ears, like truth,
Like friendship and reason.
You tell me, I didn�t try and what can I reply when I�m surrounded
By the copse of an army stained with lies? I admit to nothing,
But that truth cannot set you free, I heaped it on myself so grudgingly,
Withholding enough to spare you the noise of the disaster in my head
I sheltered you from the truth, preferring to let you sleep through the storm instead.
My compassion for you made me hurt myself
In ways you never knew.
You bear your victimization like a white flag you call truce,
As your country holds you up
And I�m taken to the noose.
The confusion of decoding the wet threads of emotion
In the tangle of my heart,
Became a task of sorting out my insides in the dark.
Finding the melody in the white noise, the sense where senses were in override...
I lost us somewhere in the frequencies too high and infrequent to find.
I�m sorry for your courage in the face of my mutiny,
In the overlap of conclusions and solutions brought to pass
My culprit eyes are sewing us a tainted eulogy.
The beauty of our history- we seem to have erased
When all they see are your tears in the ruins of my guilty face.
Maybe I wasn�t being honest
Honest with myself. Maybe all this time I was lying,
To you and everybody else.
Maybe I never liked your friends and their small town mentality.
Maybe straight will always grate against the thin skin of my abnormality.
Like a scalpel shoved up inside of me,
Tearing apart the recesses of my belief
Forcing the fluid lines of my life
To conform to their hetero-hierarchies, applying judgement to my heart
Based on their straight morality.
Cut me right out of that whole hole of hypocrisy�
Your judging eyes burrowing into me I don�t let them determine me.
You say, �you�re strong, you�ve never minded being thought wrong�.
Yes, you�re right� I put up a good front,
But you, of all people, know me and how these eyes colour mine�
Colour my perception of you, of us, of them� and of myself.
Don�t be concerned about me, I�m fine� be concerned about us,
Because we�re not. Their actions affect us because they infect us.
Tainting any hope of us mending and bending, learning new ways to rise above
Cause they teach me each day to hate the word they call love.
Their loyalty doesn�t do much but harm to me, their offer of friend
Ship expired with the first sign of a broken box set�
Their false pretense of opened mind doesn�t sit well in retrospect,
When the only thing that�s changed is the looks that I get.
Some friends choose sides, some just know the story�s never whole,
And that all their telling doesn�t change the truth, or the past,
Or the way that some things just don�t last, and you,
I think I know you,
And that maybe, just maybe, you still think you know me too.
And what can I say now, but I�m sorry.
I�m sorry to you and to them, for disappointing us all.
But mostly to you, for my letting their picture of me count
Cause when it comes down to it they don�t matter in this fall,
It was you holding me and me holding us back, and I�m sorry for that
Each time I look back.
