When they finally cut you open they found butterflies crawling on your ribcage and flowers where your lungs were supposed to be
An eternal spring in your chest that everyone could feel when you drew near, the kind of green that people craved and needed to breathe
Where your heart was charted lay the biggest, most beautiful gemstone that anyone had ever seen.
They found everything that you tore yourself to pieces looking for, all of the splendor and beauty and precious things that somehow eluded you no matter how hard you searched or how many times you cut yourself open to find. It was all right there, right before their eyes, as dazzling as a thousand suns and majestic as the stars
When they closed your eyes, the starlight had already left them. Galaxies ripped from existence because you would never laugh again, never think of one you loved, never see the first bloom or hear the first bird of spring.
I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if anything really happened. there is still a hole in my chest the size of you that no fresh spring day or starry night can fill up there is no earthly thing that can replace you because you cannot be replaced, you were part of the leaves on the trees and the air that I long for and now you are gone

You started on a conquest for your soul and it led you to a dark forest of branches that twisted to hurt you and wind that whispered lies just loud enough for you to hear that poisoned your spring and closed your eyes forever to the beauty that was inside of you that bloomed out of your wrists when their whispers came back to haunt you crouching, dark, pulsing with your blood not good enough not good enough not good enough
But they were wrong. You were enough. You were more than enough; you were everything that springtime should be.
You walked in as a lioness and out as a lamb
Now it’s winter and I can’t see you in the trees or the sky because everything is silent and cold and dying and the spring inside you is fading because
When they finally cut you open they released your beauty into the world
and it will be a brighter place because of you.

The tide is laced in my veins, in every emotion, nerve, cell, atom.
It has taken the ability to love from me because no matter how many times I try to plant a kiss on the shores of someone's heart, they keep sending me way.

Most people are just grains of sand, that come together to form a shore,
but you my darling,
are so much more.

Hands to my face.
Only momentum separates
A slap from caress; the  

Intention
So often the
Same.

If I had told you
that I was made of mud and soil
and grass and sea water
combined over two decades
you wouldn't have understood.

If I'd said my bones were branches
my hands blooming nasturtiums
my toes pebbles on a beach
on the east coast of England
you would have rolled your eyes.

If I'd said your skin after a shower
smelled like warm ground after rain
and your voice was honeycomb
your kisses strawberry jam
you'd have found it strange.

I've known you seventeen years
yet we don't know each other at all.
If I'd told you everything I believed
you'd have thought me childish.
You never did like poetry.