chewing gum
all over concrete, the places you left me.
I held her in my hands for so long,
time distorted where I had gone.
They called me her chewing gum,
a morphing without initial
separation, simply begun
that all my thoughts circled round her eyes
I even gave her mine.
Then suddenly
like water to sugar
my crafted comfort grew stale
and stuck underneath her shoe.
Iβd have promised her satiety
if she wouldβve swallowed me
to starve my vacuity
with a taste of belonging.
But Iβm already chewed
Leaving residue.
Not saying this reads like an early-2000s pop-punk lyric, but I canβt help hearing the emotional core of that genre in it. Itβs literary, yet the feeling resonates with that era: obsessive attachment, self-deprecation, unrequited longing, and a speaker who is painfully aware of how much of himself he has surrendered, yet cannot stop. Iβm writing this as someone who grew up with those songs and used them to manage a fair amount of teenage angst. I loved the central metaphor. The chewing gum image manages to be both tender and grotesque at the same time.