I used to hide your name
In my line breaks -
When you left town,
I reached out through
Smokescreens and similes.
I used to hide my secret,
Placed it delicately
Within my pining,
A secret only sapphics
Would decipher -
When I wrote about flowers,
I was describing the way the breeze
Caught each strand of your hair
In the sun's gaze;
When I went on about the wind,
It was an attempt to capture
Your scent
Mixed with the ocean breeze
That one week you
Went away with me.

Teasing and testing me,
You let clear water ripple
Around your naked form,
In front of me for the first time.
Your whispers sent shivers
Through my shoulders,
Years spent yearning enough
To override my senses.
There were no tide pools
Deep enough to prepare me
For your beauty as the moon
Threw shadows across your face;
I wish I had been brave enough
To dive straight in back then.
A few years and states away;
The months blur together now,
The moon cycles shifting
Seemingly faster every time.
I wonder if you dare
Ask yourself, what if?
When you see her,
Full and bright above you.

On these lonely nights
Talking to myself again
  
  Know you're not listening

I chase the light for so long; but then I realized I never knew what light looked like; whatever light I had in me was just a lighter shade of darkness

I am not well; I could have built the pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling onto life and reason

I could hear the sea in the middle of a forest, feel the sun in the middle of the night, hear birds under water as I felt shadows creeping into my mind at last everything was so blurry I didn't feel the wind as I fell from the cliff, I didn't hear the snap of my neck breaking and I didn't feel the moment my soul left my body. Finally I was completely numb

My insanity became her master piece, built on broken trust she's made an ocean between us.

Leave if you must, but my shores will be empty

She was night-time and I loved the darkness

The longest death I've ever felt is staying alive

“I dream every night
about a grave I have
never seen, a body
I don’t believe is real.”

My friends have cross tattoos
Verses on wrists and calves,
Hands pierced with nails-
Symbols of a love craved.
But never found; not where
It was promised. Some doors
Don't open, despite the desperate knock.
So we draw the door on our skin.
We're getting closer now,
My friends and I, closer to a life
Without end, to love without condition.
This love we were on our skin

Are we still here
Are we still loving.
Were we as lost as they said?

I have not experienced a natural disaster but I've held one within me

Across state lines
And fate's design
You'd read between my lines,
You'd seen truths I had tried
To deny
You had read poems
That were tucked
Neatly under my sheets,
Words never meant
To read
You saw inside of me

Like pressing a flower between paper sheets the morning weighs heavy on me

My eyes are heavy from the things they have seen

Let me dream...

My head holds no heaven

I think my attachment style all began when my mother ran away from home that one time.

Or maybe it was coming home from Christmas to find her drowning in codeine

I've never been the same since.

My need for another human died a long time ago

You learn to be lonely once you've spent to many nights expecting a stranger to return home

The same love never comes twice

History too holds space in the present

We kiss at a party just as everyone else does but it's as if two people had never touched before

We sit at a local coffee shop and it's like half the people speaking have something to prove, the other half deadly silence

Much like our dead reflections in the newspaper. None of this ever talked about but we know

Nothing is queeer than quiet understanding

Except maybe survival

Still We wake up beside eachother and find I've stolen the blanket again in our uncluttered apartment

This is enough to forget about our existence

For awhile

Nothing is queerer than quiet understanding...

Except  maybe  survival

I know I'll write poems about you long after you're gone

I'll dream about your hands when mine are withered and creased

But I'll hold you while you're here and embrace the time we have

She smelled like dove soap
We both did, hands freshly washed in the bar's crusted sink

Her smile when I asked to kiss her was coy   curling where our lips finally touched

She was beauty and kindness and I couldn't measure up

Time is moving too fast
and
  I am moving too slow

I wish I could build a castle of memories

Just to have somewhere to escape my own

M
    I
      N
         D

How tragic our narrative must be

To experience a love story
Without ears to listen

I know I keep leaving
Never known how to stay in one place
I am hard to love with a gypsy soul

The air feels cold again
Like it did when we walked across the curved crossroad leaving winding footprints buried in the snow

When the earth seemed to be peeling off her color folding the summer back into her suitcase

the kind of love you want to go on forever
the kind when you're three drinks deep into a bar on Sunday night
where you stay up long enough to meet the sun and turn into its fire
that kind of love
let me know when it comes
let me honor it when it is here
and let me let go
when it's time

Night changes nothing
when she's as beautiful during the honest hue of the day as she is to me bathed in moonlight

Thin skinned
Like I grew up in a childhood to recover from
Christ the savior
pinned against white walls
and if you're not careful they'll nail you up there too

She told me
that the air tastes of
nothing
but
nostalgia and arsenic

I found her green in the face
Sick on half hearted lovers

Maybe it was just the puff bar

In my mind there is a house

And I have flung the doors wide open

Only to find it empty

In the distance, I  heard rubber against the pavement

But it wasn't your car

I think....

I think

I am   wasting my life    away

Because all these  hands   have   ever
built is destruction

And  they are  

h
  e
    a
       v
          y

weighted down    by  many forgotten  dreams

Many     unlived lives


And I   am so tired...

I told you I'd wait a thousand lifetimes for you

But little do you know the lifetimes I already lived before you.

I hope one day we will not have
to

h
   I
      d
         e

I pressed my head against the cool glass
My hand imprints the humidity that lingers there

The could that never would dances in the reflection of my bloodshot eyes

I was so close.

God left a long time ago and took the
tenderness
      with
them

My mother doesn't hug me
She didn't know what to do with me
My father had the terrible anger all fathers do
     Loud and terrible
It lingers your whole life

I wouldn't call myself quirky

but there is definitely something
wrong with me

My love was as cruel as the cities I lived in

Everyone looked worse in the light

Grief is cold fingertips tapping on my window at night
keeping me
                awake
keeping me
                           aware

I stare into the
mirror at a body
that'll never be
home

I carry around the
body of someone
that should have
died

I began to realize that even though the violence was over,
I still carried it with me

I still woke up to claw marks outside my bedroom door

I still hold the anger in my stomach as I write letters to myself

begging me to
                         come
                            home

This ache is a constant reminder and the silence is louder than you think

It's a hard thing for me
to realize that I never
truly loved you

because love was not
supposed to be two broken
people sharing sheets in
hopes to heal their wounds

I've been dancing on telephone wires hoping you'll call me again just to hear  my name sound like a ballet as it floats off your tongue

Lets dance in the ignorant nostalgia