"Smokey Joe, you're calling at the station/ If I kill him there are complications/ I did not ask for this/ 'Oh but Love, yes you did.'// Maybe it terrifies me/ This quiet siege/ Maybe it terrifies me// It's too easy/ It's too easy to wish you harm" ~Tori Amos "Smokey Joe"
From the first time I saw you--blue-lit and smokey, older than I, unfazeable under your vintage fedora, as traveled as your worn-in jeans, showing good abs and two pierced nipples--from the first, you were a bad idea. I knew in that instant I should never touch youshould not have wanted to. I should never have followed you home. Two months later I was still there, tracing your tattoos, leaving nail marks like love notes down your back as you tried to love me. And when things at home got rough, when I was out all hours with you, when I had turned in and away from people who loved me like sunlight seeking dark corners to caress, I should have known better than to run, suitcase in hand, to that space along your side you said had been curved out just for me. I wanted that then. I ran back into your dark, into your bed, your smoke filling my chest with every inhalation of you and stayed cloying, clinging, burning in my lungs as I sighed your name, like a prayer, the night you came home too drunk to her my silent screams to stop, no, don't touch, don't please, get, don't, please, no, until I couldn't breathe for all the smoke in my lungs, so much of you inside me, choking on you, hot tears bursting out as you stop, drop, and roll away from me, and I ran.
I ran for the next three years trying to get away from you. There are still wisps of you hiding in my airways. Sometimes breathing still smells of you. In the right darkness I can feel the marks you've left like cigarette burns, healing over with tender new skin, reflecting the light.
From the first time I saw you--blue-lit and smokey, older than I, unfazeable under your vintage fedora, as traveled as your worn-in jeans, showing good abs and two pierced nipples--from the first, you were a bad idea. I knew in that instant I should never touch youshould not have wanted to. I should never have followed you home. Two months later I was still there, tracing your tattoos, leaving nail marks like love notes down your back as you tried to love me. And when things at home got rough, when I was out all hours with you, when I had turned in and away from people who loved me like sunlight seeking dark corners to caress, I should have known better than to run, suitcase in hand, to that space along your side you said had been curved out just for me. I wanted that then. I ran back into your dark, into your bed, your smoke filling my chest with every inhalation of you and stayed cloying, clinging, burning in my lungs as I sighed your name, like a prayer, the night you came home too drunk to her my silent screams to stop, no, don't touch, don't please, get, don't, please, no, until I couldn't breathe for all the smoke in my lungs, so much of you inside me, choking on you, hot tears bursting out as you stop, drop, and roll away from me, and I ran.
I ran for the next three years trying to get away from you. There are still wisps of you hiding in my airways. Sometimes breathing still smells of you. In the right darkness I can feel the marks you've left like cigarette burns, healing over with tender new skin, reflecting the light.