I’ve gotta go home and clean,* you say.
Clean my scent from your sheets,
I want to tell you
Come closer, baby,
Untangle my limbs and
caress me down,
orchestrate my symphonies.
Didn’t you see the stars, too?

I remember your breath all
over me
and how I tasted my very existence
within it.
I remember seeing infinity
in the golden hazel of your eyes,
those **** bedroom eyes,
soothing me past my boundaries,
hands pushing past my hipbones
and into my infinity.

And I want to tell you that I still taste
your lips on my tongue
and I still feel your teeth grazing my skin but
I don’t tell you any of these things.
I look you dead in the eye
those bedroom eyes, boring into mine.
I wonder if you’re playing back the scene
you moving over me
and I say, Okay.

Our whole existence
narrowed into one word
and in that moment I think I hate you
but the thought of your hands on me
still makes my sun rise each day
and I wonder if maybe
I love you in spite of
all the things telling me not to.

You are the spectacle of love that I am trying to forget.
But somehow i can't get your image to be removed from my brain
like it was branded on the inside of my eyelids.
All I ever saw was you.
You made flowers grow in my lungs
and although they are beautiful
it's getting a little too hard to breathe.
I am asthmatic
so when I started to wheeze,
you lit a cigarette so I could become addicted to that too.
I never knew I could need nicotine
until it came from under your tongue,
a numberless cigarette lit twixt your fingers,
burning like the bridges
between your heart and mine.
You started to need the tobacco
a lot more than you needed me
and your body frame started to dwindle
because i was not enough to keep you stable.
I blame myself
because at first I didn't notice that you were shrinking
I just thought you needed some space.
Your skin became tighter,
your knuckles turning so white
I couldn't tell if it was your bones
but I could still count each fragment with clear definition.
That night i buried my heart in your backyard,
like a dog trying to save a treat for next spring,
but I never came back for it.
It's been three months
and i'm still picking shards of you out of my skin.
You dug yourself so deep into my flesh
that you almost became a part of my DNA.
But just like the wrong blood type
my body rejected you
no matter how much i thought i needed you to survive.
But my mother did not raise me
with a wolf in my chest
so i can howl every time i lost you.
You are not the moon,
you are not the sun.
And i am not a flower.
I need more than warmth to get me out of bed in the morning.
This world is not a garden
and you are not the rain.
You do not decide when i get to be loved.

I search for you in the late nights
at the bottom of the bottle.
I look for you in the embers striving to burn
at the end of a dying cigarette.
I ache for you in the arms of a stranger,
a man with different proportions,
a deeper voice, a rougher face.

I’m searching for you in all the places
you swore you’d never be
just like you swore you’d never leave.
But the pale hands caressing your satin skin,
pale hands that weren’t mine
burn in my mind and
I wonder how I’ll ever find you in the places
you swore you’d never be
just like you lost me,
when you swore you’d never leave.

You hang low in my sky,
     like the moon before the morning—
          an intruder amongst the burning, beating,
               rising sun of my heart.

You make my tides roll,
     and you’re too hot to hold—
          blistering my fingertips
               and branding the melting core
                    of my soul.

Inhale,
exhale,
and inhale again.

Blood rises and quickens.
Rushing,
like the resin abducting my oxygen
and holding it hostage.
The smoke before me
that twists and dances and
duplicates,
making love to the air.

I look at these strands
past a foggy haze of uncertainty,
wondering how they fit together
even better than we did
when they are not
tangible bodies.

The strands, they don't hold a heart or listen
to each other breathe as they fall asleep.
And I wonder how this smoke,
how these **** dead wisps,
love each other better than
we did.