used and past tense for a reason

this isn’t the little gallery i thought I’d explore… there’s no one here with a monocle, no stupid finger-foods to wipe on my fickle-friend pants, no flagrantly fortified highfalutin fanfare. so i pretend I’ve missed the silence, ooo, my cigarette is keeping my attention because i’ve never seen anything blow smoke but you i waited for the perfect soundtrack to mock our destiny, but I’m pretty sure something posthumous has eked out the residuum and i guess we are a war i never knew I’d been drafted into I stopped counting once I learned that flowers smelled better i suggested a tune you’d deem petty once Romance had entered; I had no inkling of your afair so my brave lack of entitlement shrouds this sickly morning-eyed dewey mess of thought: those you speak of as if a dream has set upon them to provoke or otherwise haunt your intermediate and temporary into something you’d like to remember of me so i know there is a poison running laps in your lymph, and its stealth has let you quench your thirst on your prepubescence the path I laid, I let the birds have feast it’s all okay we hid seeds in our footfalls little did we know there were other hungry followers