If Your Friends Don’t Like Me

If I exist entirely as a
performance of my heart,
my spine meets its god
in the spaces between your
teeth. When you do not
like what comes from me,
when her eyes crystallize
in tandem with the skin of
my smile, it becomes messy
and tangles itself upside down
like bad fruit. I am
bad fruit, when I know there
is nothing good in falling.
I talk and talk when I know my
tongue is beginning to fall out.
I am rotted and holding on
so I do not become
compost inside you, or inside
the roadside graveyard of the last
small animal who did not
bite. So I
do not become the presentation
of a false enamoring.
I do not tell the crows to go.
I do not say I feel like
leaving my skin alone again,
and letting what is in me
untie, promising to never be
a sickness of imitation.
Though, we know.