Open Casket Relationship
maybe it was the letter you wrote or maybe it was the simple word you concluded it with goodbye and it said more than your mouth ever did with all your talk of love with all your talk of adoring me and my words and all the while our love was still encased in an ice age of passionless oaths and vows in a glacier of dysfunction and a cheap box with the sap still oozing from the wood i remember thinking of you once as a freshly dug grave which someone could easily fall into without any warning i remember you as the caretaker who leaned a shovel against a tree and walked off carelessly i remember you less as a caretaker than as a carelesstaker carelessly discarding what i once felt for you disregarding the hours of conversation and it's another same old story that everyone has already heard but i belly up to the bar anyway and proceed to tell it to an uninterested bartender whose only response is a grunt and a yeah that's a hard one and would you like another beer and i'm tired of the same old jukebox songs i'm tired of the same old grey steel and machines i'm tired of endless skies and i'm tired of trying to get to you so i practice my jukebox lean and laugh as one song after another promising eternal devotion spins as one sucker after another buys another fucking myth another lie and they don't realize that sooner or later all love dies and we're all reduced to peeking at the remains and wondering what happened and what it used to be mangled beyond recognition beyond your reach and you'll never touch me again never hurt me and so i toss a lily of the vile taste you left in my mouth when you came and when you went and especially when you left and a handful of dirt in the hole you dug and roll the coffin over dumping its contents onto the ground as it tumbles and it's funny because it seems so peaceful so content but the makeup rubs off and i can see where we bruised it where the bones were broken and never knit properly after nights of bedridden resentment festering like sores in the hospital of our dreams where the doctors never quite patch things up as they originally were and humpty dumpty leaves reciting all our rhymes just a little bit slower and lower than he used to be you used to tell me how much you adored me i remember when you first told me that you loved me when we were talking at dawn and it was already morning in texas and texas is always the reason for my deep in the heartbroken state of denial and the roads stretch on for days of rusty pick-up trucks and rustier pick-up lines in bars where they spell beer lone star and maybe it once was that somebody hit you with a purty stick or that a nice lady like you shouldn't be in a place like this but you dragged me here unwillingly i didn't want to be in love with you and i fell anyway and i didn't even notice that i had broken my ankle and couldn't walk away until it was too late and your poison penned love notes had already started their terminal labors