Used To Poem by Matt Render

You used to love me enough to show up
When my head was down and buried
You'd appear with a hooked hand and extend it down my velvet red esophagus to pull the words right out of me
You don't do that anymore

You used to show up with a mallet and before I could react or brace myself my head would be opened and splattered against my spring mattress

And now those same fragments lay here upon the street like discarded rotten melon chunks with no one to eat or devour them

Because no one loves me enough to taunt my existence and haunt or be witness to this downward drift into oblivion the way you did

There's no one here to remind me that pain indeed is pain and my bleeding feet and tongue aren't merely happenstance.

And that the blackness of this night is indeed black and the depths are as untenable and despairing as can be.

I miss those days when you taught me how to bleed and to want and to live and die in every gasping attempt for relief.

I awoke from the dream to see that everything I had imagined was real.
And all that I took to be real was lost

I was taught by the best.
And I know the difference
Between the meaningless pain of our existence
And the art of disappearing.

I was taught to forget
And In that forgetting
I feel like i know you
Better than ever