Oh! You think so highly of your beard
Lo, that you would shave it for only me!
and the curly brown hair atop your head
Soft on my breast as we lay between sheets
I could write a paragraph on your thigh
the softest of your form
And trail words from clavicle to loamy ***
with poems on every scar
I could strand myself upon your chest
Straddle you there, and sing of each calf
But most of all I love your smile, with edges that cut my tongue
And the lift of every spindly lash
Could you return such prose?
A body a canvas, a romance
No. I don't suppose.

It started with the scarf
Plaid and Disney and good around your neck
Until I grabbed and yanked and felt the fool
It started when you said someone texted you
and I wanted their face under the heel of my boot
It started with German
insults, games, study packets
It started with your crush
Latino, taken, and oil to you
It started with your tears
Beautiful while you cry
Beautiful after working in stables
Beautiful when just woken up
Oh I just need to get serious
It started with the first time I stayed over
It started when we became family
It started when our hearts broke
and we exchanged some of the pieces
It started when you became my best friend
or something more
With little inside jokes and our hands around each others' throats

Now you know that I’m just a borderline
I’ll kick you out when my bloodstreams flow
Even if a firm hand on mine could stem it,
I let you in only to tickle the sinew and marrow
But I love you, true, you’re my only glass case
Needing you to borrow all my pain,
I pinned your wings and made you taste
The bile of my noncommittal pendulum again, again.
Between the tumult of self hatred and desire’s embrace
That dark dysphoria you found in seeing me
Enflamed loss when I left the mire of us
Without a battle calm instilled at the seams
Allowing our hearts in the rolls of our sleeves
We are dangerous.

I met a lover lied. I told him all my lullabies.
But the silence in my heart drove him mad.
Drove him mad.
He said I’m screaming.
Like a little bowl
Echoing off the essence of a hollow soul