books and bad ideas (first edit)

[ellajam]

Hi, I think you can cut page 1, maybe page three, maybe the first 2 lines of page 365 or the whole of it, maybe the first 3 lines of page 385 although I like them and became interested there. For me the fun started at the Lemony Snicket line and continued right through, well done. Thanks for the read.

This was just one of those things I wrote on a prompt (see title) and it's gotten to the point where I don't know if I should scrap it completely and move on, or if it's worth some editing. I appreciate all feedback, because I'm so lost on what to do with this damn thing, and ignore the purple, that's just a stanza I need to flesh out a bit.

And as always, since this is a spoken word piece, I can provide an audio version if necessary.

-

page 1:
you asked me out.
Usually, I'm not one of those people who flips to the back of a book,
checking the ending against my expectations.
I probably should have made an exception.
Something something something something

page 3:
you told me you didn't like to read for fun.
I shelved the issue.

page 365:
I found myself breaking covers instead of bones,
thumbing through the dictionary for words that were papercut deep.
I'd been at odds with reading since just before we started dating,
words would blur at the edges,
my concentration unraveled like dime novel glue.
At a writing workshop in high school someone told me
that every writer should have a story where the protagonist dies,
page 372 was when I realized I was writing that autobiography and you didn’t even have a footnote in my acknowledgements.

page 385:
as you took a sip of my coffee,
arms wrapping concentric circles around my waist
I realized this was not quite the love story I had read about.

You see,

Our relationship was a Lemony Snicket chapter book,
in that we were a series of unfortunate events
and it started with a house on fire.
It’s an Edgar Allan Poe story,
where someone else’s heartbeat was so much louder than my own,
and all Annabel Lee really wanted
was to go back to sleep in that sepulchre down by the sea
if her cheeks are salty,
we’ll just blame it on the tide.

We were from Inkworld and maybe
if we’d said it aloud enough times,
I love you
I miss you
we need to stop hurting each other
spelling it in the spaces between our tongues and our teeth
it would’ve tasted like fire honey instead of Adder’s breath.
We were a Neil Gaiman novel,
because bad things still happen in a book called
Good Omens.

Our final battle stretched across
seven books and eight movies, except
this
is not Azkaban and
I
don’t take prisoners.
It was the way a knife loves a heart
and Hannibal Lecter loves
loudly implied cannibalism and things that don’t quite
taste like chicken.

I was crocodile tears and you were crocodile time bombs,
where the screaming took a right at the second star
and went straight on til morning—
We were a Reaping,
but there was no one to take my place.

Let's be honest,
our relationship was no fellowship
and I’m not your Precious.
We could have ridden off into the sunset
but your horse was named Ego and she wasn’t big enough for the both of us.

page 912:
I'd like to think you cried big inkblot tears when I left you,
stamping out the bad days like a Rorschach print.
You tell me you were the lady,
not the tiger,
convincing me to stay for one more page,
more chapter,
more volume--

But you see:
some stories don't get a happy ending.
Sometimes, they just