Was it love or desperation?
I can't remember the distinction.  

When you're starved
each crumb feels like grace.

Each small affection
a fervent offering
to a broken beggar.  

But at this point,  
I'll take what little
I can get.

I want it to stop.
not anything in particular,
as if one thing could fill me, or fix me
or glue all the cracks that are leaking me out

I want it to stop.
just everything
everything that's inside me

I feel like a void
empty and full of longing,
and a suffocating panic, knowing it will never stop
that I will never be filled and i will stay like this.
until I'm not like this.
because I am not.

so i think about being not
more than being,
and somehow that seems better
and easier, and hopeful

If only some of those comforts,
in words and arms and love,
spoken over me in memoriam
could find their way to me
while they could still find me

perhaps they wouldn't need
to be said at all

you always made it look easy  
to pry back your corners,  
carve out a piece of your heart  
and transform it into soulsong  
Your words and rhymes laying perfectly over your intentions  

snapshots of your soul  
painted in love and pain and blood,  
whispers in your synonyms and syllables.  
I saw your soul laid bare, and in my heart it was just for me  
each of your tomes a secret glimpse to savor  
so brash to see myself in some  
and cowardly to hope absent from others  

so I wrote.  
stumbling after your eloquence,  
fumbling and unpracticed  
without any of your skill or precision,  
clawing at myself for something  
I could offer, to speak to you  
in your own language  
as if some small piece of you still belonged to me  

which makes you my muse  
of a sort I suppose  
For truly every time that I wrote  
I wrote for you.  
not for you, but to you  
to read me and know me  
my heart pressed between the pages of a book  

and we communed  
as close as 1’s and 0’s would permit  
through lines on a screen  
never able to reach past our fingertips  
a call and response  
in codes and comment boxes.  
A secret conversation between us,  
that not even we spoke about  
until we didn’t speak at all  
but I can still find you in the lines  
and imagine you are talking to me

I cannot love you but I do.  

I cannot hold you or feel you under my fingertips  

I cannot run my hand from your shoulder down your arm,  
slip my fingers into yours and clasp hands  

I cannot quench my lips with yours  
or taste you on my tongue  

I cannot feel your warmth under the sheets on winter nights  
or the cool of your breath on my neck in summer  

I cannot see you in the morning, hair tousled and sleep in your eyes  
or when you walk around the house so casually  
scant, pretending you don't know that it drives me wild  

I cannot find my world in you at the end of the day  
or quicken my heart when I hear your keys in the door  

I cannot wipe your tears or hold you when the world is broken  

I cannot share the joy and sadness in us both, as one  
who understands the scars on your arms and  
on your soul  

I cannot call your name in passion  
or for comfort in the middle of the night  
or see the promise in your eyes as the syllables tumble over my lips

I cannot hear your voice with its bubbly and sultry intonations  
whispering songs and secrets to me  
or get lost in it's sound for hours  

I cannot love you in my arms,  
So I will love you in poems and memories and dreams  
and sing a song for you in the silence

will you come to my funeral?  
I'd like to imagine that you would.
but you probably won't even know that I'm gone  
until months or years have held me underground

it would be fitting
in some morbid irony
to have our many intersections,
always crossing at bad timings or circumstance,
be punctuated with the greatest chasm of all
the last time that you see me

but at least I won't be there to **** it up
Anymore

It seems that we were always destined  
to be made up of stolen moments  
Distilled seconds filled with the universe.  

In a hallway  
In hands clasped under a desk
In twilight whispers over copper threads
that stitched us together
In pools of street light and darkness
flickering through the windows of a bus

If I could choose one moment
to stretch out into eternity
god, it would be us

But in truth the grains of sand
that measured our length and breadth
were scattered few and fleeting

Forever looking in others
for what we were always destined to lose