I hope she knows what she's getting herself into.
I hope she knows what your heart sounds like after a night of
comparisons between her handwriting and mine.                                                                                                                                      
I want you to know that I am through with dumbing
myself down to fit inside your god complexed hands.

Don't tell me I never tried to save us.
I wrote you songs with knives on my palms
and your ears were anything but listening.

I had a dream about you every night since you told me
you didn't know how to love anything with a heartbeat and hope.
I started sleeping again when you came back, and oh when you came back...                                                                                                                          

I am not sorry that my temper is as short as the lifespan of us.
I am not sorry that your smile is the only one that ever made me
want to wake up in the morning.
I am all pain and long long longing and she has always been
a storm with a heart dead set on your stillness.
Our problem is that I never stop shaking long enough for the dust to settle.

I've been writing with the same pen for four years and
you still only recognize my words when she plays them back.

Let it not be confused, foggy or incomprehensible-
you were the one.
Until the one became none and I stopped being a number when you stopped counting miles.

I hope she loves harder than a woman with dementia, relearning parts of you every morning
in the places you reserved with my first and your last- maybe next time.

Maybe next time, maybe next life will be different.
Maybe I'll be patient, stronger, I'll stop covering my smile. You'll stop pretending to be in love.
I will stop shaking and the dust will settle and her poetry will make you sick.
Her poetry will sprout evening primroses and she won't know that you always fall asleep before midnight
or that you're allergic to flowers that bloom when the sun is down.

I am not going to lie anymore, it is easy to write about you.
It is a gut instinct.
It is muscle memory.
I kept the letters, the postcards.
The first one you sent is in bad shape; folded edges, crumpled body.
I almost set it on fire twelve times.
You don't understand how every night I stand outside looking at the stars
realizing that we can probably never see them at the same time.
There is nothing poetic about how we feed off of eachother.
There is nothing healthy about holding on to this.
But all I know is that when I talk to someone, I almost always say I'm sorry as a greeting.
Because nothing I ever say will be pretty anymore, I have a serpent tongue when you're gone away.
And I'm sorry that they're not you.
I will still get your words on me.  I will hold on to the pain of the ink seeping into my skin.
Forever doesn't have a fighting chance against the chokehold grip you have on my thoughts.
Instead of this train of thought, paper bodies.
Ignition.
Fire.
Think of me when the candle goes out.
Think of me when you're drunk again.
Instead of this poem, broken bottles.
Instead of this poem:
Blue sheets.  White pillows.  Your hair was never this color before.
Your poems were never about me.
Slam poetry in the way you threw my necklace in the river.
Find me waiting at the window for you to let me in.
You left the bottle open, it smells like whiskey in here.
Blue sheets but yellow flecks of sunlight and candlelight and streetlight.
The light has almost disappeared since you went away.
Instead of this poem:
Come back. Stay away.  I am fluent in ******* things up.
Fire.
Ignition.
Paper body.
Think of me when the candle goes out.

Scars fade
Pain *doesn't.