February
Three squeezes.
My mother told me that
Sometimes the words get tired,
Sometimes people get worn out,
So  we can squeeze instead.
Three squeezes, and four in return.
I love you.
Too.
You pretended not to understand,
Too afraid of permanence.

June
Your face was just as familiar
Even three weeks away.
Your warmth my home,
Hand in hand and natural.
Three squeezes.
Four in return.
A gravitational pull,
A nirvana,
A promised land.
You were mine
to hug so tight I might crack a rib.
But that's just how I loved you.
The squeezy type of way.

September
Three squeezes.
Silence.
A reluctant reply,
A command sent from the mind
But not the heart.
The silent book we had written together
No longer lay open on your shelf.
My mother told me that
Sometimes people get tired,
Sometimes people get worn out.
She never told me that sometimes
People get tired of you.

I hope it's different when you kiss her.
Kiss her all you want -- you are a free man,
but I hope you notice the spark missing.
I hope your heart keeps beating at the same pace,
not excited by her mind or the way she speaks.
I hope that there is a different kind of yearning --
I dare not hope for nostalgia,
but perhaps an emptier kind of desire.
I know that you will love again
but I hope that you do not confuse
this momentary physical love
with the kind we once (hopefully) shared
(Do you think about her late at night?).
I know that your lips do not love me
and your hands do not love me
and your mind has forgotten how to love me,
but I hope that your heart still bears
smudges of me when you kiss her.
I almost hope that for a split second you forget
that her name is not mine.
Maybe these hopes are delusional --
maybe a kiss is just a kiss
to a boy like you, who stops loving with the seasons.
But I cannot bear the thought of
her face replacing mine.
And so for sanity's sake,
I hope it's different when you kiss her.
Please let it be different when you kiss her.

I loved everything about you,
Even the bad things.
I spent every day of September
Sending kisses to the parts of you that needed it most
And folding up your smiles
Like dog-eared pages on a book that made my heartbeat sound a little quieter.

I cried for three days
When I thought you were dead, and three days
When you realized I wasn't.
I suppose you were tired of filling in my gaps;
When I returned you had already forgotten my name
Like the title of a song with no words;
On the tip of your tongue but it could be any of the two hundred and seventy-six.

I fell asleep to the humming
Of your cranial chords
Knotting and un-knotting to the point of nausea.
I would have held your hand all night
But, as young boys often do,
You needed to be your own (tragic) hero.

I remember the last time I felt alive,
Standing in your kitchen memorizing spoons for a day I wouldn't be invited to dinner.

Lately you've been in the pit of my stomach when I try to sleep.
You're turning and turning and kicking from the box under my bed
With the beaded bracelet and the candy wrapper
And the memory of a time before we really knew what love was,
When I wore your jacket because I was supposed to.
And the pink lighting makes it kind of like a dream,
Where you don't look so grown up
And so strange like a piece of you went missing from the inside,
a cog out of place in a beautiful, graceful, worried machine who has hearts on every fingertip.
And I don't know why you don't reach out, touch me and wake me
And ask how that's going while tracing the curve of my hip
Like you were a breeze across the water at battery park,
Where we pretended to be shy.
And through the neglected fish tank I can almost make out the figure of the elephant
And the stark contrast of your open eyes against mine closed.
But maybe you were just a pair of eyes,
and maybe there was too much ash in the cross on my forehead.