Of dirt and deprivation
your fist took its time, burying in
mine that deepening kindness
I never knew my filth needed to
find. A first, for sure, keeping
my cool around yours. Impossible

chore, awful task of having
to pretend to ignore how bad you
were at holding what hurt more
carried inward. This burden purpling
under-pressured, wound your own
comforted without words. Unspoken

grief our hearts both heard, but for
so long mine preferred. The game isn’t
to live longest but to die
with your soul intact, as war isn’t
about winners but rather
who’s left. Standing stranded under this

much damage, understanding
for once an ending’s whispering at
the edges of perception.
Attraction to hot messes filling
a well spitting wishes no
one else but us witnesses, knowing

how to feel without speaking
unwieldy, unyielding subtext. I
don’t have your reputation
to uphold, I can’t traumatize you
if you bought the ticket, when
in the thick of it. This commitment

stitching together two fools
too used to refusing to choose,
instead, disabusing our
heads of useless mythologies we
used to let be led, as tools,
through city streets that act as neural

pathways back, to losses left
unaddressed, that we must’ve buried
under black mattresses of
nights our spirits detached from sweating
flesh we let strangers possess
and inhabit. And yet, we accept

each other’s wreckage without
question. Then, inattentive at best,
how, when we met, you didn’t
press me to stop pressing those buttons,
knowing I was passing my
own test. Pissed off, love still manifests.