a lexicon with undefined words

i spelt your name out in dominos, but my clumsy elbow kept knocking you over.  they were all as blank as this page before i started filling it with gunpowder verses, but you know a thing or two about ‘blank’ don’t you ?  you like filling blanks with mad-lib-nonsense.  i emptied my word bank because they all reminded me of you; tricky words, foreign words, four-letter words, words i don’t mean, words you don’t mean, words i made up, words i foolishly thought would evolve into sentences, words with no consonants, words with no vowels, words with no letters at all.  you’ve always had a fetish for mispronouncing diphthongs like i’ve had a tendency to look past the spelling errors, but our crossword puzzle was never completely finished.  probably because you never started.

(you never had the attention span)

-

I ____ you, but _______ just aren’t _________ anymore.
  (verb)           (pronoun)              (adjective)

Believe me when I ______ say this, but _____________.
                         (adverb)                (cliche quotation)

-

i confuse magic markers for veins,
and vanity for attention,
and attention for love,
and love for you.

but your paintbrush temper uglified my awkward canvas with vacuum tantrums, and i’d rather not irritate your jigsaw ego with my automatic writhing carpal.

-

the tourguide crayons are coloring over your empty domino pages, and my sharpie knows something you don’t know: your feather limbs and decimal hips taste like the ancient encyclopedias i use for romantic references.  if i could, i’d erase your permanent ink and tear out the delicate pages in its misleading binding; i’d rewrite the story of your life, but your textbook is dull without my name in it, and my attention span is weaker than yours.

-

dear You,
you won’t read this, but writing ghostletters turns graphite into catharsis and printerpaper into chronic melancholia.  my cramped hands and charcoal arms have a mind of their own, but they’re both stumped on the crossword conundrum that is you and me.
sincerely yours, me(ss)