Whenever I write about you
The words rip the paper and it tears in two
My hands grow tired
and I need to put the pen down

Whenever I ask about you
The blue walls turn gray, windows slam shut
My eyes roll back
And I need to lay myself down

Whenever I talk about you
I am on a stage and the microphone clips
My throat bleeds
And I need to step down

Wherever I go looking for you
The cars try to stop me and the stoplights turn red
My feet hurt
And I need to go back

I put dead flowers behind my ears because it’s what I did when I was a little girl. I saw myself through the eyes of the boys I longed to impress, to see me as more than just a child.

So I put dead flowers behind my ears.

I didn’t do it for them, I liked to see them seeing me. I knew what I wanted to portray. I don’t think they ever noticed, possibly just dismissed it as odd, the girl who plucked flowers and killed them to steal their colors.

But I always felt hellbent on taking nature for myself. To be part of it, out of this world but still in it. A girl in bloom.

Wishing for a boy to notice that thought. Wishing for him to be the first to pick up a flower and put it behind my ears.

Wishing to be seen. To have a mind shared, without the need for words.

Time to forgo the idyllic promises
Of love and its crimson garden
Avow at last for anarchic solitude
That leaves me craving,
but never starving.

I wrote on your back words of a bygone era,
Back when we were a a collusion in the making
Not souls, not cells, not matter
Yet by then, Nabokov had already met Véra

And to her, he wrote about a strange joy
Ane what he knew right when he met her:
He only ever existed within her eyes,
He was only ever seen through their letters

I’m not sure you hear the same notes,
And I want to be a lover, not a beggar
I want hear the songs of your thoughts
On a loop, growing louder, forever

We see, we hear, we watch,
we talk back. We write.
This is a strange time to be alive.

And if a reader finds this poem,
Buried or dropped or kept:

You see, you hear, you watch,
you talk back. You write.

And I bet you feel the same way.
What strange time it is, indeed,
To be alive.

I heard it from three stories above
Candlelight sparkling dark windows of dawn
A melody, murderous sounds of a dagger
Brutal weeps of ripped strings in mourn
The man haunts in song, in laughter
Hums quietly, in his staff he banters
With a violin he slaughters