I Have Done So Many Things – Sasha Benderskaya

February 12, 2025

I have left you long before you left me. Cry about it, bitch

I have watched you leave me and cried about it like a little bitch
But
I’ve never missed you, not one bit, not even when I should have.

I have found someone else. Fuck you
and your two-bit friends whose dad breath stinks up every room they enter
I hate you, I hate you, and I don’t know you well enough to do either.

It would be easier to say that it was all good, or all bad, or all real
but it wasn’t.
Who am I to lie in the faces of all those left who matter
and you won’t, not ever again
and you can cry about, bitch
but I know you don’t. I know you sit up in tree-houses
with cowboy hats on and cigarettes aflame, lighting Tao Lin books on fire
and drinking Heineken or some other dykey imported beer,
and reading each other bedtime stories in the fading light of day.
I know you swim in the creek where I once grabbed between your legs
and drank sweet cherry wine and floated like we didn’t have a goddamned care
in the world
and we didn’t!
and you still don’t!
But the joke’s on you, buddy, because now I don’t either. For you were
for better or for worse
the albatross around my neck, and I the star-studded cross around yours.
To flash at drivers across the road until they beamed their high-lights,
to greet your mom and dad with hugs and watch their beaming faces cry
by God, he’s done it! He has fooled some fool woman into thinking he is lovable
into thinking he is someone, or something, and not some thing,
but the joke is on me, really,
because God knows you aren’t. And you haven’t been.

Now I drink cherry wine at parties you weren’t fucking invited to.
Now I float in the ocean and I don’t think of you one bit, fucker
because all those who once rang church bells and jerked my chain around, and grabbed my face
and hollered,
what the hell is wrong with you?
Do you not think you harbor some sort of
crimes against this nature?
Do you not think your denial is so potent,
even we can fucking smell it?
Well, they all hold my hands and cheeks and pour water over my feet
and shake their fists up at the sky
cursing, swearing, fucking you
and I’ll never fuck you again,
not that I really did in the first place.
Your cum will live in its God’s honest truth,
in its final resting place,
inside a sock at the bottom of your I should’ve tried a bit more drawer.