Suddenly, the world went numb. All the pain, the worry, the apathy, the carefulness; it all went away. There was no sound, no hum, no white noise. The light stopped flickering; the curtains stopped dancing with the breeze blowing through the window. All I felt were your hands.
Slowly and softly making their way down my shoulders, tracing my skin like fingers exploiting a map. Gently feeling the goose-bumps form along the surface of my arms, and gently intertwining your fingers with mine.
I could have closed my eyes. I could have convinced myself that your love for me ran deeper than this. The truth is, this was the foreplay before the passionate goodbye. This was you staining your pigment onto my skin.

“Stop. This can’t be your goodbye. You can’t leave me like this”

You stopped. You looked into my eyes; the same eyes I looked into so many times before. As though you had it all planned out, you brushed my shoulders with your lips and whispered in a way that still forms goose bumps along my thighs;

“I have been looking for ways to show you I love you.
Now all I can do is leave”

-I've learned to take the sheets off of the bed and wash them and if my hands were big enough I would curl them into fists and call you to tell you that your ghost no longer resides in here but I don't have your phone number anymore and I don't miss you quite as often.

-You're white flag, your war-rage reverb inside a rib-cage and there's no microphone to mutter into. Slam poetry isn't your thing but ******* sometimes there's an itch, a scream half-muffled that wants to talk about your hair raining down on their cold pillows just before the lights go out.

-I've never owned an ashtray despite the chimney that mimics my mouth sometimes. It's telling your mama you made it for her birthday because you don't want to see her face every-time you check in once again for the last time into a hospital. Even if making it is keeping a plant alive.

-The scattered light rays that travel into your room in the afternoon when you're getting drunk alone again and don't you dare call me bad because baby, I was raised that way. You can't put a band-aid over a broken bone. There's a fire in my palms no psalm can actually pronounce.

-your writing career has plummeted so now you sit in a bus stop as people tell you their life story and you feel like a priest but there's never any relief and the confessions get more heavy so you write about it but there's never anyone to hear, and even if there was would it heal the bruises?

There’s a strong sense of intoxication in every conversation I waste on lost translations,
and every word you speak floats in to the air without consolation for all the love it lacks,
and the lackluster thieves that stole your love from me began to latch onto dreams and all I tried to do was to believe that nothing was so broken.
No one was cut open and bleeding out the wounds we’d caused,
and I was just a piece of mindless emotion and you were devotion.
A simple notion to keep holding a loose grip on reality
and to keep trying to keep something with all finality
that it was lost in the normality and brutality of it all.
And I wrestled with my god to help me forgive those, for they know not what they do.
But I’m sorry I did when I kept lying to and hurting you.
It’s not about what we saw but what we knew, and we knew the end was coming soon
and tried to run from it but tripped on our tongues
and resisted the temptation to pray for compensation.
An empty sense of motivation to find a definite destination
of which windows weren’t shattered and the faucet didn’t leak.
But with every word you speak I hear a distant gunshot and my God did I bleed.
But after procrastinating the act of purification and without a clear manifestation we referred to suffer the damage of the storm.
And the roof caved in during a torrential downpour.
So this is how a forever withers, and how a love slips through shaky fingers.
And I still don’t know any sense of realness or a piece of sanity,
but I found amity within the stitches of our tragedy.
I hope that’s enough for now, or I guess until another window breaks.
Whichever comes first.

Once I spoke the language of the flowers,
Once I understood each word the caterpillar said,
Once I smiled in secret at the gossip of the starlings,
And shared a conversation with the housefly
in my bed.
Once I heard and answered all the questions
of the crickets,
And joined the crying of each falling dying
flake of snow,
Once I spoke the language of the flowers. . . .
How did it go?
How did it go?