I want to start off by asking you to forgive me. I've never been good with apologies, only making lights in hospital flicker and leaving dead roses at your doorsteps as a reminder of all my withering mistakes. People spend a lot of time in hospitals when they feel guilty, people spend a lot of time with things that are dying - it makes them feel like they are paying for their sins. In the grand scheme of things, I get to watch you die for free when you inhale your burning, filtered death, and it is a beautiful thing. Admit me to the hospital, for I find that I used to have a heart but the love inside of it has turned malignant, it has eaten away my chest cavity and left nothing but a gaping wound that bleeds darkness, and your staple kisses can't even hold the wound together for long. Admit me to the hospital on the basis that love is blind and I had gouged my eyes out for you, willingly, for in my sight I saw the promised land and it looked a lot like you and I never knew paradise could be so cruel. Admit me to the hospital, and ask them to put me into an induced coma, and in my unconsciousness, tell me that you love me like you did when I was sleeping, because guilt makes people feel crazy things; guilt makes me angry that I am not a beautiful sunset, that you won't grab your camera and windbreaker and rush out to catch me before I disappear. I always loved you through the wrong vision, like staring out of stained glass windows in an empty chapel - you're supposed to be the one in the confession booths, yet here I am, etching my feelings for you like hieroglyphics into church walls and wherever else people will either abandon when they're happy or visit when they need a reason to not feel so guilty. Churches and hospitals are not so different , you and me are not so different - we have always been made for the guilty, and we are full of prayers from people who might not know that one man died for all to show his love indefinitely and I have been trying to hang from a tree ever since just so you would know for one moment. Again, forgive me, I have never been good with apologies.

I want you hold me more like bible and less like a grudge, but you just want to mumble proverbs to my neck while I touch you like a psalm, both of our breaths lost in senseless revelations. I have been keeping to much track of how many times you try to break me into lines so that maybe I will look more like poetry and less like a eulogy; you're only here because you have time on your hands, but darling, I have blood on mine and I'm sorry that I have had more than a few thoughts of what you might look like covered in red. Dying never should be ******, but you told me I look killer in this dress, and I know you only said it because you see it's strapless and you're so used to seeing me wear my heart on my sleeve. It won't matter once I'm dead, or even once we touch, but all I know is that this bed feels cold as hell and you're right here beside me and that's a paradoxical statement but so are you and none of that is even close to fair.

When you laid in my bed, you were a landscape painting, and I had filthy hands. When you sat, ******* and upright at my kitchen table, you were a storm and I had nothing solid to hold onto. Everything else in between is a blur, and I am grabbing whatever I can from the Styx swirling around my synapses. In the end I am holding onto what feels like broken glass and I am trying to describe this in a way that will lure you back under my floorboards until you seep through and catch me by surprise like a flash flood. Everything about you stings like saltwater and everything about me bends for you like light and I am so covered in wounds and you are so covered in shadows. When you lay in my bed and sigh like God; when you peel an orange in a way that makes my heart feel all your tearing and pulling, I can stutter for up to six hundred ninety one thousand two hundred seconds. Eight days pass and my lips slowly learn to speak again.

you are not twenty seven years old. you are twenty seven sorrows, twenty seven apologies, twenty seven broken pencils in a coffee mug. you used to keep memories like fireflies in jars, but now, you harvest them like organs, and you can't shake them to make you glow. i stuck a bird in where my heart should be but my pulse still sounds like a dial tone. the way a ticking clock drives a person insane is the way everything falls in love with you. the way everything falls in love with you is the way that delicate things break, and everything is delicate in the presence of a hurricane. you know how to be a storm, but no one loved you enough to show you how be a home, and the foundation you are built on is a broken as our mind - you are held together by tape and tiny hands , you are bound together by apologies and if anyone forgave you, you would simply fall apart. we must fold ourselves seventy seven times and tuck ourselves into the arms of the people we love, in hopes they never learn to read our language, and you are words written in a way that leaves everyone hanging onto each one by the skin of their teeth, even if they don't understand. I hope it's fine if i still try. if you are brave enough to touch the world, you will find that it is constantly on fire, and you never have to ask for a light.
you are not twenty seven years old, you are twenty seven wet matches, twenty seven empty rooms to scream in, twenty seven breakdowns in the bathroom. sometimes you are the sun and you can rise, but you are a deadly comedown (in any event, you are always glowing). I can hear you folding and unfolding like an origami flower, my hands know where you bend even though i have never touched you. i have seen the fear that drips through the cracks in your tough exterior, and i pried apart my own innocence to slip my way inside.  
  how many times do you groan before you finally heave and let the weight **** you? you know, contrary to what is generally believed, love knows bounds very well. it knows them and, it plunges over them, spills and overcomes you and foams around your feet before dragging you out to open see and mocks your cries for help until you finally stop thrashing and succumb to the sick trick that you have fallen for. i used to think love was a steady push and pull, but then i love you; when play tug of war with a ghost, you always end up with enough rope on your side to make a noose out of. i wanted to turn you on, not disgustingly, but in the way that i stumble in the dark, groping the wall for a switch. all of my nerves were hair triggers when you opened your mouth, now they are loud sirens and they scream when you are gone. a barely present as you would like to paint yourself out to be, i have felt you in places that are four dimensional, in the depths of my own murky consciousness that not even i know how to reach. the way a storm busts down a wooden door is the way that you enter a room,  the way you enter me. you know how to bend the light and you know how to break it, too. allow me to envelop myself in you like words in brackets, but never let me speak aloud. how many times can someone caress your jaw until it feels like you've been clocked repeatedly, and how many times can you fall in love with same person before you bust your mouth completely on their shoulder?
even after you have dragged me through this fire and made me bite all of the dust and all of the concrete beneath it, i have still loved you with a mouthful of broken teeth. now i am here to spit them out into your hands and make enough room in my throat to cough up my stifled pride.

Walking in a circle is, in the fondest sense, going absolutely nowhere, even though it feels better than walking completely backwards. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but I have never even been face to face with you and mine grows weaker and weaker with the length of time between the moments I get to touch you. The strange thing is that, prior to meeting you, I have a hard time describing what it was I was even doing - the storms you have hurled into my quiet life is all I know now, and I never realized just how flimsy my own infrastructure was. I have seeped into the walls you throw dishes in and the floors you roll around on, and I feel everything your fists do equally, if not more. Who knows my body better than you? The places I dip and divide and ***** and bend; who has held me down with nothing but words and sweaty silence that lay thick enough for us to cut with butcher knives? My stomach is trained to clench is desperation when your name is mentioned and I am nervous around anyone who shares with you; a picture is worth a thousand words, but your name is worth one million, and you've never spoken mine aloud but I have murmured yours, like a mantra, repeatedly, groaning in the way wounded animals do and trembling with that same fear. I can't count on my fingers how many nights I traded sleep for a reason to talk to you, and all too well do I know how many lifetimes are crammed into the seconds before an anticipated phone call. People might wonder how I even survive when you aren't around, but how many ways can a dog entertain himself when the master is away? Oftentimes, in a state of unwarranted panic, I claw at my clothes as though you are lurking underneath, and only rarely are you there, metaphysically. I am not the only person the rain falls on; I understand that there are plenty of others who are lulled by the charm of someone who knows nature of a human being in the way that otherworldly creatures might, but in this instance I know that everyone is haunted in their own exclusive way, and you are always flickering in the periphery of my blurry vision when my bedroom lights are out.

We write about two AM because it is simplicity and we are underexposed. Overtime, simplicity becomes complex and subjective and harder to define. Soon you associate two AM with her hair holding on desperately to her shoulder blades, but at that point it doesn't matter what time it is because all your brain understands is her mouth and how badly you want to kiss it. Everything is clinging to something: hair to skin, sheets to mattress, mouth to teeth; but the real fear lies in what will end up letting go and this is why we are born with out fists clenched, because from the moment we are living, every insecurity spills like air out of a bag you thought was vacuum sealed. See, life is full of complexities and we can't seem to find permanent serenity, but, in the midst of it all, there are small things that resonate within us and soon we collapse into a string of cliches and we fight not to drown within them, collectively babbling and trying to make sense of the concept of never letting go.

You were not a breath of fresh air
you were the choking
of sadness infused
smoking
in every room
tabacco stained fingers
left marks on every table top
and top to bottom the house was so
dust filled
that you had killed
all ******* signs of life
the room was rife
with scents of her and no sense
of morality
you just turned to see
but choked every good growing gracious thing out of me
you don’t hear any noise anymore
lost my voice
somewhere on the floor with her
underwear and
everywhere there’s
another girl’s hair
strands and hair bands
and when I close my eyes it’s her hands
touching your shoulder blades
and the concaves
of your collar bones and
clean clothes
and it’s so clear that when I’m here
she gloats because her hands
have become your hands
and now they’re wrapped around my throat
And so when she chokes
You choke
And I-