I believe that the sound of beauty lies somewhere loosely with the stars you've been holding in your eyes ever since you muttered that they were too hot to hang onto anymore, that fingers were slipping and the universe was too large, too cold anyway to fall in love over and over again with overlapping atmospheres.
Look at me with your lips.
Since when did we start kissing with our eyes, and why did it have to be me to soothe your wounds with my mouth.
I'm trying to find you somewhere in all the blood in my sink, more drowning than swimming, but all I'm getting at is that I should have loved you harder.
Tell me yourself then, why is it so hard to light a fire when the matches are 200 miles away?
You've always been my only light, my only primary source of survival, and without you I'm slowly leaving the place that was never really mine at all.
It started with the small of my back, that you should have been touching, that place on my shoulder that isn't quite right without being pushed against yours.
9 pm.
Not such romantic timing.
I'm always late with you anyway.
This time I'm splitting open my ears trying too hard to hear a scream that isn't there.
It ended with the numbing of my heart
where you should have been the whole time
where I'd never let you go.


(-a.r.)

My best side has always been colder without you right next to me.
I've always kept both my palms empty in case you ever wanted to hold a place you can comfortably call home
just in case you like the parking spaces for your heart more vacant, than simply empty.
But there has been no time for space ever since meeting you became my only vision, my only dream in this truthful illusion I've pet-named, life.
Somewhere within the darkest hours, between 1 and 3, honesty reveals it's shy face.
That is when I accept,
that my heart resides with you.
Because with you, is the only time that it accepts to beat.
I'd be a lair if I said that even amidst sunlight, I do not find room for two.
Laying next to you in bed
decaying while smiling into each others eyes, has become my only goal.
And you must know:
Falling asleep to the sound of sirens as loud as a million little laughs echoed from your deep, deep chest, is quieter when my own mouth is there to consume the noise; always my favorite desert, and your specialty.
I will be there to engrave your smile lines into my memory, whether you like it or not.
Like breaks in pavements that line busy streets
the ones you see every morning on your way to work, tempting you to turn around
but you don't dare break your mothers back.
And I am so, so sorry.
Love is no longer a choice, and anyone who's ever had one, has not ever taken one glimpse, at you.
They have never tasted sugar, without anything occupying their tongues.
I want a tattoo, an, "Until death do us part", not an, until the so called permanent fades.
Sinking my knees in quick sand for you to see,
love is something I always define with the few simple letters that spell out: "You."
"Only you."
"You are all."
You are it.
I just don't want you to be the blink of my eye.
I will not give up, until your lava hands are coursing my skin to unconsciousness
until erosion cannot talk back to us.

The existence of love was never a belief to me, sitting on the shelf right next to God and happy endings
collecting dust and fragments of all the times I thought, "I don't want love to be real, but I think I love you a lot."
Imagining what it really means to be held and to be blanketed with a warmth that is warm inside and out, without being harvested in a ***** cold, dying out like bare trees in the December seasons, that shudder and shake the chips in their shoulders until the sleet can fall off.
It's like walking until you reach a point in the road where you don't know where you are, where you're headed, why.
And it doesn't matter in the slightest.
There is nothing left to say than I love you, and that I don't believe in ghosts.
But you haunt me even when my eyes are closed and my ribs are moving in slow motion.
I wish I could kiss you even in my after life, and if heaven exists, I'm going to look God in the eye and ask him why he didn't give you to me sooner.
And then I'm going to tell him that all I've ever wanted was you.
No golden thrones. No pearly gates. No velvet beds.
Just satin skin wrapped over the bones I hold so dearly, as close to my heart as I possibly can.
I don't believe in love.
I only believe in you.

I have found love hidden between the low valley's of your perfectly high fingers. Love that I thought was lost at sea, and would be much too drenched anyway to bother to be found.
I have found love in the dark universe beyond your mouth and with teeth like stars, I think your lips are mouthing "I love you too", like pearly gates, voice like velvet ropes, pulling them either closed or apart.
I can almost see your skin light up when I grace my fingertips against your bare chest.
Cold, yearning to be warmed, if only by one small hand. As if my fingertips are the keys to unlock years of quiet defiance.
Our hands fit perfectly, I think that means you have the key to me too.
You are so soft, so tender, I am afraid that if I beg to caress your delicate face, you just might melt below my warmth, but I am a puddle of melted snow competing with just brewed coffee, and eyes all the warmer.
Thank god, thank god, thank god.
I am frozen solid, and somehow, you've thawed me all out, and didn't just mop me up.
You are so beautiful. Sometimes I just want to sit with you in your car. Just look at you. I want it to rain hard against your windows, on your roof, and I want to kiss you even harder.
Want thunder and lightning to cower in the strength of our lips.
I will just listen to the rhythms of your breaths until I've figured you out.
Until I understand what makes you smile without even flinching.
Until I understand love.
If I could possibly be any closer to you than we are right now, I'd be a glacier, transformed into faint summer rain.
I'd pour and pour and pour, if I could wither away with you.
"Won't you just hold me, just don't say a word."
Suddenly it is a desert in here
and my ice cube walls are coming down quickly.
You are less an inferno, more a kindling fire, to a shivering soul.
You are the only one who would never burn me down.
Thank you for being my only source of heat.

Beautiful is something we either never take enough time on, or always take too much.
So *******, with a pearly white smile on my face.
Because today, I will write about something beautiful, and I will remember the way it begins with the letter “you” or “why” or “you are the love of my life.”
And you are, there is no will, there is no way, of denying such solidly factual things.
But lightning never struck twice in the same place where I come from, and if we grew up in the same neighborhood, it might be easier to understand.
Pretending that love is just a thunder storm, and flickering lights are just temporary, is nothing but a permanent thought.
And you are tattooed right on my brain stem.
So if you are going to take me in your right hand and pull me close and let your eyes fall slightly until our lips are doing the same
please think about how many storms have turned into hurricanes
and how many hearts a hurricane can ****.
I know, this was supposed to be beautiful.
But mainly, beautiful things have to be truthful.
And the truth is not always pretty.
But you are breath taking
I think that is why there is still an ocean between us
but I am willing to drown.

I've made it a habit to set fire to the things that I love
And you, I love the most.
For you, my old words have thrown themselves at purple flames
and drowned them out with inferno tinted tears.
We are creatures of habit
and I may have made a habit of myself.
What if I don’t want my habits to reek of sitting in showers
1. have I washed my hair yet
2. the water has run cold
3. I have already showered this much today
Confusing sunrise with sun set
1. has it already been 24 hours
2. am I awake
3. how much time has gone by, how many sun cycles have I wasted
You are only sleeping with tragedy, when you become this sad, for this long
But what if I want my habits to be nothing but repetitions of you
Habitual skin and bone and scent and love
But love is the hardest habit of all to break.
I hope when we are finished, I am still in one piece.

I’m trying to grasp the concept of your hands grasping me, and there’s light in your serenely contorted sweat;
Bulging veins pressed against sweet warm delicate mouths exerting a mass of please, and please what?, and a quiet commotion of soft tongues making love, fighting slow and easy for something like a longer I love you, maybe, or another tight grip towards a vulnerable destination, where angels live in the whites of your glassy eyes, but I just want heavens doors to slam shut.
I might be the devil and I demand: “Oh please dear god”, but my body is your only savior and getting on your knees to worship a little never hurt anyone.
I ache for your touch, till your flames are still
I am swimming in thoughts of your ice-made skin, and I am satisfied with hypothermia
Beg for you to watch me choke on my breaths until you can write a whole new list of tasteful sins on my naked flesh.
I want to swallow you whole, want to melt away with you until we deliquesce into one.
I crave you
and me
a few hundred tick-tocks full of skin on
tender
post-possessed
skin.

I am crippling away at the thought of not being here next to you without the slight of your smile against mine
And I realize now that I have taken for granted every moment our hands have accidentally touched
And your smile still brightens my world and there is not much light in it at all without you and without you
I think I’m driving down the wrong side of the highway without my headlights on
Without you I think I am a pen that has long ran out of ink and at this point I’m just scratching away at scarred paper.
There will be no time to heal when I don’t want to heal when I’m not with you.
I’m trying to learn how to be my own mortician with all this alone time.

When the thought of missing you hurts worse than being stricken in bed with your hands behind your back and a stomach full of an anxious history, filled with a marked up calendar of therapy dates,
that is when I will miss you the most.
The thought of missing you is pumping heavy venom into my heart.
Thinking of you like this, with an empty mind, prompts me to think of what it will be like, two years from now
when I am still stuck laying in that same
grieving
position.
I cannot move without you,
and I cannot bear to imagine my days and my darks without you holding my hand and guiding my blind ways.
Because what am I without the love of my life?
And exactly how many miles apart are our fingertips before they can touch?
When I roll over in the dead of night,
I expect to find your naked body to hold,
but all I discover grasping is another layer of bed sheet.
I miss you with a vengeance.
I miss you so bad, all I can taste is blood in my food.
And you are not even gone yet.

He is next to you
and he is real
and you have never felt skin so warm.

You've never been held like you were really meant to be here and you've never held yourself and you're afraid because never have you ever felt so in place never have you known a home like this and in the backseat of his car and while it's cold,
never have you felt so alive.

And skin on skin has never felt so alike and his inhales and his exhales have never been anything but the world's greatest mystery or a rising and setting sun or a room filled with nothing but moonlight that you've been dying to solve since the day you heard his laugh boom and boom in your brain like an avalanche ready to melt ready to **** ready to resonate forever in that bright part of you for the rest of heaven knows how long and I guess that means until we make love again.

His body: the entirety of every single spec of his being, is praying grounds.
And I will worship every spectrum of the all reasons I love him until I can tell you just what I mean through every word I say, without blinking an eye, without breaking a sweat, by only accomplishing the impossible.

And when you find that you love someone else, more than you love yourself, please realize, that that, is not love.
You are only halfway there, and you are not caught in his repertoire of thunder
of thrashing lacking oxygen under layers and layers of the ocean and wanting nothing more than to be side by side
until you find that you are in love with yourself too.
Until you can stand still in a tsunami and still speak the words, "I am not there yet, but I am okay."

He is beauty sealed in flawless flaws and even these I fantasize about.
All of which I can recall like the back of my hand but I know his better
and I want you to know I think I love you more than anybody has loved anybody and I will
always,
as tenderly as I can,
when our dreams come true of soft light through white bed sheets highlighting the patches of hair on your face that you hate so much and your lack of a six pack,

Know that you are lacking nothing.

Because you are everything.

You are every last droplet of beautiful in this world
you are every single ounce of hope that lies deep within me
you are so much of the sweet that I want so badly to grasp in the throbbing palms of my loving hands
needy, only for you,
and I would not have you any other way.

I want you just as you are, as purely as I can have you, for as long as I can.
I want to make you know that you are, in every form, the most entirely breath taking human being that has ever graced this existence of ours.

In a vow to you:
May my pulse never run cold.

I always save the best for last and I dream words that spell out your name in my sleep
I think that's why I always wake up with my chest numb
It's exhausted its bones trying to save the nimble thing behind it that pulls at every string attached to our lives
Looking for someone worth the ache
Trying to find someone worth breaking for.

I have written poems about you
with tears strung decoratively among my face.
I have composed sonnets with the taste of your mouth still stinging on my tongue.
I have vowed to you nothing less than everything I have, down to the core of my fragile bones
when my spine went missing till the very day I met you.
I have recited oaths I learned from the patterns in which you toss in bed.
I have spat heavy loud "I love you's" as if they were the only words I ever knew
and the last I could ever speak.

You, you are wonderful, spilled across pages of wonderful.
You, you have been torn sheets scattered across white crisp blankets longing to be accompanied.
You, you are hope tied strictly around index fingers.
You are a carefully sealed envelope thrown carelessly into mailboxes empty with everything but void.
You are precisely applied lipstick smeared on pursed lips,
nervous the red will smudge off your skin and become permanent on someone else.
Scared that, even if you kiss other people, the red will always stay.

I have found that I, am all but shorelines and beach waves and sandy toes and yours.
I am poised fingers stacked inbetween one another,
strategically trying not to place a hand on yours.

I want to undress for you.
I want to discard the clothes from my body piece by piece and show you the warmth that lives under my skin for you.
I want to prove to you with every ounce of sunlight you've put in me, that each step my heart takes is only to get closer to yours.
I want to strip for you.
I want to strip myself of every impurity and lay myself in front of you, vulnerably, left with nothing else but every little trace of every memory of your lips having touched my body.
You are planted into every part of me.
I hope that you never stop growing.
I hope that one day I can learn to sprout into something that is as beautiful as the way you look at me.

If you've ever broke out into hives, you would understand what it would feel like to be one.
If anxiety has ever stripped your veins,
If inspiration has ever lacked the blood leaking from the depths of you that explode like title waves against rocks, you would know what it would feel like to be stung.
I've realized I haven’t been aware of transfixed rage and clenched hands trying too hard to hold on to something that loosened its grip a match and a half ago.
The fluid in my liter told me it was never really meant for cigarettes; all they ever do is deteriorate.
There is blood covering my sheets and evidence to cover up my gruesomely blank eyes.
Everything is coming back to me and it makes me wonder why I've ever given up.
They say that words sting and if bumblebees killed themselves after hurting someone else they’d be a lot more like me.
This is ripped and crumbled paper in the form of a mental breakdown.
You have composed me of jolting pupils and false accusations.
I’d rather be writing in my journal.
I’d rather be scratching down illegible ink marks than doing what I’m doing right now.
If you can hear that, it’s the sound of windows breaking.
It’s the sound of your heart forcing itself to shatter
It’s the sound you make when all you want to do is become a drone to vivid darkness and a loss of senses.
I would be a lot more like bees if their venom could actually put the living in their suitable graves.
I am substituting pain for pleasure even when I feel nothing at all.

I don’t want to be a bumblebee anymore.

I might be the only one who wonders what it would look like if daises transpired from your heart to your mouth.
If thunderstorms stop pouring from your eye sockets long enough to wonder if sunsets know what they’re competing with
if tides are aware of what they’re up against
in a world this large and with only one you
“What’s your favorite place on Earth?”
And lately I've been answering with wherever you are.
Earth has never been my favorite place anyway
and if all lips could kiss like we think they should
puddles would be lakes of pink and red and your teeth that I can’t seem to give up.
Tight skin and warm hands spare me a lie
when tongues drift into steps you never knew the language to before.
If I don't believe in heaven
and if young love is aimless
you are doing a **** good job.
I think that birds sing in the morning as soon as you open your eyes and I relate to them
I can only hope to be the flight of wings you hear in your dreams
I can only attempt to let this paper take shape of you.

I wonder how long it would take for my father to notice the cuts on my body or for my mother to notice that I sleep too much and when I do,
dreams don't come out right they come out left and sort of backwards or inside out or black and white they are never grey,
but always real.
My dreams show up in my reality and I can't wonder too long because 321LIGHTS

It's gone.

I wonder how long it would take for his touch to infect these pages
and leave stains that soak through to where he last grazed my scars.
I Don't Know If He Did.
But I think he did.
I remember the way they felt,
and I remember imagining what they felt like to him.
Maybe like acid.
Probably like 3 long years of looking at me like thin fragile shattering finger bones,
or the spine of all the books he never read.
Then why do his palms feel like a remedy
I haven't found out about yet.

Poems are like cutting your skin because thick words turn thin and human ink is shed and racing blood wears cold.
Poems just trigger more poems like trying to crack a razor out of its shell.
Razors are always the quiet girls,
or the Ghosts:
Dead human souls that feed off of other peoples "Hard times!"
A date on a page can be as tempting as a dark street with a broken lined scab.
Everyday for 30 and only one empty space has the courage to change.
You want to take that pen
We all know you do.
We know you want it running circles underneath your hands.
Define wrists without wet pillows and your brain in it's angry stance.
Try to imagine a place without him.
Skin is a cigarette.
Why don't you take a drag.

You are the chills that make traveling down my spine its hobby
when your breath slides itself temptingly down the pattern of my sweating neck
and both of our names become a slurred chorus of too-close puffy lips and rolled back eyes and soft writhing hips being spoken over each other with more crescendo each time and louder and louder and you know my fingernails have always thirsted for your skin and my tongue has always pleaded to be a part of you and
my breaths have refused to do anything else than inhale your exhales.
The windows of your car are perspiring like us and I think the temperature is rising high enough for everything to explode.
I think this moment was always meant to happen.

You've given me pieces of you that I have learned to never accept and maybe it’s because they’re sharp or maybe it’s because I can’t keep my hands from shaking long enough to explain it to you.
You've given me a reason to be blind, you dared me to never open my eyes but when I asked why, all I saw was you.
If I shut my lids tight, there you are, fireworks of green and yellow and blue. Only if I open them slow enough. But I am never careful.
Do you feel that constant heaving in your throat too? It must be Gods hands wringing the life out of you.
I don’t want to say I love you anymore, but I love you so much. I can’t handle it and I don’t try to swallow too much all at once.
I just let it spill and drip and burn whoever, I can’t say that I care.
All I can attempt to do about making you leave anymore is to make you stay.
I try to steady my pencil and remember how to write your name over and over again on my notebooks till they bleed with my eyes closed and my fingers inside out.
I want to rip your chest apart and I don’t want you to ask me to return what I found inside.
It’ll all be broken anyway, you won’t want it back.

I rip my chest plates apart, the most rickety china you own.
I throw my heart on the ground because I can feel my love for you too heavily in the depths of my decaying bones.
You burn right through me and I let you sometimes.
I imagine the weight of you never being too much to leave me strength less, because I've watched your chest rise and fall like the world was making way for you in the remainder of its eternity, as if the galaxy decides to lose itself in the stars when you exhale fervor into the crook of my neck.
It isn't too much. I will never get enough.
I’m knocking at your door,
but instead of knuckles,
my heart is in my fist,
And I am beating against your chest.
You draw really well, and I hope you know I’d give you permission to make art on my skin.
I’ll be your canvas if you let me in.

I think I fell in love with him long before I even knew I did. I think I had fallen in love with him between trying to figure out if I had already or not. When he cried the day he thought I was going to smoke a blunt with a couple of kids older than me, and the day he told his best friend: "I think I'm falling in love with her." Up until right now, lying on my bed with my head rested on my crossed arms, listening to the sounds of his breaths lull him into deeper states of sleep; dreaming dreams you and I can attempt to imagine, but only a beautiful human being like him has the privilege to see for himself.
Sometimes when we're on the phone for a while, and I know he's tired because I can hear the rasp in his voice return just like the night before, when he was at the verge of sleep, I don't say anything. I just let him. I just let the silence fill the void between the crease of his struggling eyes, and I remain silent. I let his eyes close. Because I like when he falls asleep. It's comforting, and peaceful, and less lonely hearing his little intakes of breaths every so often.
Sometimes I don't want to hang up, because I know I'll be lonely again once the sleepy silence between our call has ended. I usually draw it out for an hour or so before I force myself to hang up, but never before confessing my love to him every night, quietly, as honestly as I can. Of course he can't hear me, but I always hope that maybe somewhere in his unconscious mind, my words are able to reach him. Maybe in his dreams. Or maybe they never do, seeing as though, occasionally, I remind him in the morning of what I said to him, and he smiles, and pleads for me to never stop.
And that's what makes it worth it. That's why I say words he may never hear. Because somewhere along the line, heard or unheard, my subtle words are still able to put a smile on his face. And I think that's all any of us strive for, is to smile, and to find love, and for love to find us. Whether or not we even know it ourselves.

I still haven't hung up.

I don't think I will.

I fell in love with the way our fingers intertwined and your breath when it was heavily against mine. I fell in love with loving you, you were a novel rated 5 stars: "The novel of a lifetime!", but my lifetime especially.
I fell in love with you without a trace and without a doubt. The only freckles that have frightened me are the ones I've faced that scatter across your arms in the summer, because caring about freckles, and also a dimple, and then a smile, more than you care about yourself, is scarier than I had originally thought.

You fell in love with holding me, and imploring me to love myself because you loved all the curves of my body and the way my jeans hugged my hips. You fell in love with the way my pupils time traveled, while your heart played the role of the time traveling machine.

Lastly, we fell in love with each other.
And I wonder if you contemplate why it is called falling as often as I.
I wonder if you find out the way I do every time we kiss.