you, my love, are the light of my life, and you - are ruining my writing. lately, when i sit down and try to write, all i can seem to come up with are grossly overused analogies and tired metaphors that have been recycled a thousand different times. all that flows from the end of my pen are flowers and stars and the creases that form in your forehead when you smile and how much i'd like to lose myself in the galaxies of your irises - and it's disgusting. this twilight-esque prose, this juvenile symbolism and puppy-love poetry that pours from me - is not me. i'm no Poe, no Plath, no Kerouac, but i like to think that i'm okay. however, recently the caliber of my writing has been reduced to nothing more than rainy-day romance and child's play. and god, everything rhymes. i feel like i'm sixteen again in the best way. it's because you've stayed, that you are changing everything i thought i knew about love. i catch myself absentmindedly drifting to visions of a shoebox apartment in a city somewhere and furniture shopping and even the B word (babies). that's so unlike me, that is so - amazing because nobody has ever been so serious about me and i think that maybe, baby,  someday i'd like to be 80 with you - oh god. you - you are too many poems that all sound the same, but each time i read through them i somehow manage to find something i haven't read before. you are open doors and patient arms with a voice like a lullaby that resonates in the darkest corners of my mind. you are saving grace without condition and a love so deep i could go for a swim in it - and maybe that's why i'm drowning, because all i ever really learned how to do is doggy-paddle. but you are so patient. anyone else would have quit on me by now. the idea of forever has always terrified me, but the promises you make sound so real that i'm beginning to think maybe they are. baby, you, are eyes like soil and words made of rain drops, and every day we grow a little more. i adore you. i am so sorry that my meager words can't do you justice. my ineptitude is criminal, but i'm trying. and i think that i would rather be vomiting these clichés than return to the world of gray i lived in before i met you. i love you. i love you. i love you to the moon and back and every planet in between. you are the sweet to my tea and the leaves to my tree. and every song i've yet to hear but somehow i manage to follow along with. i wanna scream it from the top of a mountain or the middle of a grocery store, about this love that leaves me with butterflies in my belly and fireworks in my heart. baby, i've never been so happy to embrace mediocrity. my prose may be suffering, but my heart is soaring. writer's block has never been more welcome than when it bears your name. so wipe your feet at the door, take off your coat, and please, make yourself at home.

- m.f.

Death stands above me, whispering low
I know not what into my ear:
Of his strange language all I know
Is, there is not a word of fear.

I think I fell in love with him long before I even knew I did. I think I had fallen in love with him between trying to figure out if I had already or not. When he cried the day he thought I was going to smoke a blunt with a couple of kids older than me, and the day he told his best friend: "I think I'm falling in love with her." Up until right now, lying on my bed with my head rested on my crossed arms, listening to the sounds of his breaths lull him into deeper states of sleep; dreaming dreams you and I can attempt to imagine, but only a beautiful human being like him has the privilege to see for himself.
Sometimes when we're on the phone for a while, and I know he's tired because I can hear the rasp in his voice return just like the night before, when he was at the verge of sleep, I don't say anything. I just let him. I just let the silence fill the void between the crease of his struggling eyes, and I remain silent. I let his eyes close. Because I like when he falls asleep. It's comforting, and peaceful, and less lonely hearing his little intakes of breaths every so often.
Sometimes I don't want to hang up, because I know I'll be lonely again once the sleepy silence between our call has ended. I usually draw it out for an hour or so before I force myself to hang up, but never before confessing my love to him every night, quietly, as honestly as I can. Of course he can't hear me, but I always hope that maybe somewhere in his unconscious mind, my words are able to reach him. Maybe in his dreams. Or maybe they never do, seeing as though, occasionally, I remind him in the morning of what I said to him, and he smiles, and pleads for me to never stop.
And that's what makes it worth it. That's why I say words he may never hear. Because somewhere along the line, heard or unheard, my subtle words are still able to put a smile on his face. And I think that's all any of us strive for, is to smile, and to find love, and for love to find us. Whether or not we even know it ourselves.

I still haven't hung up.

I don't think I will.

I remember every month you would get a haircut
because you couldn't stand the strands touching your face.
You blew it out of your eyes
and folded it back from your forehead
but you weren't at peace until it was gone.

When you left,
it wasn't entirely your fault.
I liked tomato soup while you liked chicken noodle;
you watched television in the mornings while I flipped through the channels at night;
I couldn't blame you
we just didn't work out.

Yet in this moment I am biking past your house,
it is late and I can see the television flashing through in the window shades.
It is when the house is out of sight when I start thinking of you;
the yellow dotted street line is your spine and I am tracing the curves with my wheels,
the leaves strewn across the road are your freckles and I am so lost
in a sea of your anatomy that I do not even notice the headlights.

They say before you die your life flashes before your eyes,
but all I see is the television through the window,
strands of me draped across your face,
and how at peace you must be now that I'm finally gone.