“I need you close to me” said the porcupine
“I need space, I miss rabbit and fox” pled the squirrel
“Once I feel better you can leave”

“I’m lonely”
“Move closer, I’ll ease your isolation”
“Ok” Sting. Recoil.

“Why do you distance yourself from me?”
“Im sorry, it hurts”
“This is why you're in pain, you turn away from me”

“I just need a moment”
“Not until we're close”
“I’m bleeding, I need rabbits soft fur”

“Rabbit doesn't love you the way I do”
“Im anxious, I need fox’s kind words”
“Come near me, I will help you heal”

“Im worried about your spines”
“My spines? You think I have spines?”
“Don't you see them?”

“I don't know why you would say that to me,
I try so hard to be here for you”
“You're right, Im sorry”

Naming our first cat
Raising our first kid
Our garden, our flowers
I love the sound of Ours.
Did
you know it? The night we
met, that
you might
see me
like this? I didn’t that night.

Whenever I would bite a carrot two things used to cross my mind
My dad, and how its just as easy to bite off your own finger
Now I think of you, how you hate them, how I should have bit my tongue

Love and passion are often confused–
I began with something real.
Love and passion don’t walk side by side, love
tears down walls with a hurricane of butterfly wings

and passion walks easily through the rubble.
I don’t believe in the thrill of the chase, the
opposites attract, or the love that's formed
between two people lost together at sea. Fake.

I’ve experienced 100 exciting-stressful things
but I’ve only experienced 1 you. And they have not
felt the same. The night we met in front of canes
I had lied to my father, and my mother, to see you.

I hated the thrill of the lie, driving with you high,
off devices I couldn't name, I hated that.
But we kept going and chatting, I ignored a stop sign
Sure that I would get pulled over, knuckles red-white,

But you spoke sweetly, said it was ok, I think we knew
that I was colorblind to red when it came to you, and you
smiled when I called with my friends, and you looked so pretty
in the streetlights, and we talked like it was easy. I loved that.

One fish asks another, How’s the water today? The second replies,
What is love? It’s okay if it doesn’t make sense to you—
it makes sense to me, like the way I needed you
before I even knew your name. and honestly

It feels like I met you twice, on the luckiest day of the year, and
the luckiest day of my life, and again in a Kalhert parking lot.
Disappointedly sober, so we crawled into each other unprotected,
And shared songs like pieces of ourselves.  I met you there.

To have learned love from you, I am eternally grateful
that I will never have to feel love turn to hate, or feel
the sting of betrayal, because we weren’t perfect together
but you were perfect with me, and you handled my heart gently

I Think how wonderful it is that I have loved you, because you have
given me love in the buildings and in the trees, and countless things
that bring me back to the thought of you, and I will love to take my walks
and hear your smile, in the way the wind blows through the reeds, of our preservation

Before a rose colored mirror
Blue orbs tracing devotely
Not their reflection, but the jagged canyons
Curling from the edges, like roots
Repentantly sprouting to hide  a corpse.
Red meteors plummet in slow motion from fingertips
Of a reflection, as he stands before the cracks,
Feeling the wet truth of their cause in his palms.
On the floor, his eyes meet
His eyes gazing up from a jagged island of glass
Finding himself only with head bowed, in
A broken past mistake.
7 years bad luck.
Do you think he knows,
That behind the veins,
There's more than blood?
I do.

One of my earliest memories, is in the morning
I didn't take the time to get dressed,
I went to my door and squeezed, both hands,

Proud that I had solved the child-lock
Too early for a kid my age
To be awake, alone, and heading outside

But who sleeps well through shouting?
It wasn't too cold for me
Even In just my superman underwear

So it must've been summer.
I went down the steps
From our high front porch

And went straight towards
A dandelion, not blooming
But full with seeds

And I wished
for love, love
between my parents,

And cried.
My first
Memory crying

Was
For
Love.