you always ask me about love when i think that we are creating it.
when our entwined legs mimic the twin quotation marks encircling
a silence, your fingers tracing out crop circles onto my chest as if
they're attempting to communicate every scar across the galaxy.
i will answer with an alarm clock heartbeat and a tongue that glides
through your ear like honey: some people only love in the dark.
it's guarded with a harlequin smile but what i wish i could say is this:

i believe that people's hearts meet like plane engines on landing pads,
crashing down just long enough to leave trails on the concrete before
they realize how much they miss tasting the air between their toes.
i believe that when sid first saw nancy, his bloodstream confused her
smile with the iv that supplied his starving veins punk rock & poison.
i believe that love either leaves you to bleed or to wish you still could.

but i also believe that love can last. for nine long years, hachiko
nuzzled against packed concrete and waited on empty railway cars
because the odds were, his dead owner would have to come home.
there is a man who serenaded his shower walls with the name of a
disappearing girl; i hear he still makes love to her ghost every night,
surrounded by a stadium-lit choir who wouldn't recognize her face.

the last time you asked me about forever, i realized that stars don't
even last that long, let alone feelings we shove inside pericardium.
what we deem unsinkable can hit one glacier and send a thousand
into the sea; forever is three syllables that even titanic can't touch.
my nineteen years are a paper anchor if this ship ever goes down,
but i'll be ****** if a psychic's visions of fire and ice and endings
stop me from falling in love on deck until the band stops playing.