The first time I saw you naked
I felt like I had discovered an entire planet
Uncovered the secrets of the universe in the curve of your hips

You are a galaxy of a girl
I had already seen the stars in your eyes
But I had missed the constellations on your skin
All the little craters like the moon

Your body is a landscape
The kind that the masters strive to paint
With valleys and rolling hills
Mountains and caverns
And I'll explore you with sunset kisses
Topographic touches
I'll give you a bouquet of compass roses
And let you know that you're my home

Close your eyes
Erase whoever is tattooed on the inside of your eyelids and find comfort in the darkness
It is yours
Inhale, exhale
Repeat this for the rest of your life

When the starry nights turn cold
Wrap your sheets around your feet
And curl into the comforter, finding solace in your solitude
It is okay if you cannot lift your listless body off of the bed
This also means you can not hurt yourself
Take a shower, wash the day off of your skin
Send your sorrows down the drain
Do not worry if you still feel unclean when you step out of the bathtub
This just means you need to scrub deeper

Inhale
Exhale
Pass the air through your lungs, let this be the part of you that never tears
Find beauty In your breath, sending little sailboats floating off into the night (clouds?)
Compress your chest if you must
Reach inside your ribs and take the balloons into your hands,
Be gentle
Remember that you were a child once,
That they still live inside of you

Inhale
Exhale
Repeat, repeat, repeat this like your favorite song
The one that you keep in your pocket like a lucky penny
Keep the music close to you, voices of strangers soothing you from your self- estrangement
Pianos will always hold your hands
Guitar strings will kiss your fingertips
Breathe, and exhale song

When it is dangerous to be alone
Surround yourself with the hum of other people's souls
Let them take care of you when you cannot take care of yourself
That is what they are here for
You would do the same

There will be some nights
When the pain in your chest makes you bend in half
Open a window
Soothe your lungs with the winter air
Dehumidify your eyes with the dryness of December
Dim the lights
Inhale, exhale
Repeat this for the rest of your life

I'm sick of hearing about drunken men
Slurring their thoughts out through the tips of their pens
And the history of poetry had been bleached as white
As the parchment on which their poems were printed

Are we going to
Be okay?
Can you come to my window,
Dig up a few stones from the
Earth,
Hit my window, wake me up.
I can be your landlocked lover
Just give me a river
Kiss me underwater
Let me be your swimming pool
My
Nights will no longer be
Opaque, but transparent
Pulsing with handfuls of confetti stars
Quivering like my lips.
Rest is for the dead,
So let's make our heartbeats quicken.
Take my hand, and
Under the watercolor sky,
Violet with the breaking dawn,
Wait until the sun returns. Know that we're
eXactly where we are meant to be. Say
You will stay.  
Zip up your coat, and we will keep each other warm.

I am spectacularly
Ignorant. I cannot understand anything
Complex, not to mention intelligent.
Somehow, I am miserable at
Every new thing I attempt, I
Fail at the same things I watch my peers
Excel at.
Over the past few years,
I have found that I am worth
Absolutely nothing. I hate myself
More than I ever thought was possible.
I really don't think
I'm going to be okay.

I keep cutting windows into my cardboard walls
Square-shaped snapshots of sunshine
They remind me that there is a world outside
Of my dark and dusty paper cage

I don't bother with panes of glass
(I do not want to see my cold reflection)
But instead I leave the gaping holes wide open
And try to remember the taste of fresh air

There's a girl in my bathtub
I can see her dancing on the surface of the water
Her eyes glinting in the florescent bathroom lights
She and I have a lot in common
The same cropped hair and scars,
Crisscrossing our bodies like little train tracks
She shivers as the water pours into the tub
Hot rain falling from the faucet
I watch her beneath the surface
And I wonder if she is drowning

I think I loved you most the winter your heating was broken
And we’d stay inside all morning
Pretending to complain that we couldn’t get out of bed
Our clothes becoming little islands on the floor,
Ones that we could not quite find the courage to visit

Your hand stayed glued to my hip,
Your breath warming my shoulder
Like a long drag of whiskey
That kind that had a home so far away,
In a glass bottle on top of your refrigerator.
The one that would not be opened
Until that fateful day in February,
When everything went wrong

And on that unbearable night
When you joked that you’d freeze to death if I left you
There was a long silence
Like it might be true.

Now it’s warm enough
That I show too much skin when sitting in bars
And you avoid me like the plague,
Whispering in any girl’s ear that’s near to you
Every time you see me watching out of the corner of your eye

We should have stayed inside when the ice began to melt
Because I think
When those doors opened and we finally ventured outside
The world had changed,
And so had you and I.