Did you need them as much as they seemed to need you?
A dire necessity that wrung me out and then bottled me up
Must you go?
Can't you linger?
Let me wrap you around my finger until it's too much
But it won't be
The friends, your fans,
they're calling, and
lone and terrible I remain

-cj

Please come over. I’ll have a tea set, my clavinova dusted off, Apples to Apples, Bananagrams and a fireplace for philosophical talk. You can keep telling me how the regions of the body have different tones and pitch different notes, and how the ridges of your bones show like ripples in a desert. I’ll wallow in your catalogues: all the warcraft of WWII, the chemicals that preserved the cats we dissected, and the steps to dissolving the puzzle of calculus. You will master the Rubik’s cube over and over again just to amuse me. And deep inside, I hope your poetry isn’t as good as mine. But I’ll still dance better and I’ll still cuddle with you in our home theatre, and I’ll pay you a piece of my mind once I’ve made it up.

I feel too much.
I judge too quick.
When I see a flaw, I just pick, pick, pick.
I'm too much of a perfectionist.
It's something I will never admit.
I'm too empathic, I care too much.
It is nearly impossible to earn my trust.
Sometimes I don't know if I'm in love or lust.
Sometimes I just want to give up.

Every moment hurts differently.
Like a crippled butterfly
Traversing a hurricane.

Three summers ago
I loved a boy
who's hair when moved
by wind or hand
was always magical,
who possessed tanned skin
and eyes so blue
they were waters to drown in.
Around him I felt enchanted
and he was enthralling.
He captivated me,
turned me into a slave of my emotions,
with words and promises
I knew he couldn't make come true.
"Run," my friends urged me, "as fast as you can."
But without him life was jaded,
their warning
had been voiced too late.
Already I had pricked my finger,
on a spinning wheel
and fallen head over heels
in that chemically induced slumber
we sometimes call love.
He opened a door for me that led straight
into a world filled with
bushes of roses
and buckets of sunshine,
I promptly forgot that too much sunshine
scalds the skin
and turns it a burning, vivid red,
almost as vivid
as the crimson blood
a touch from the thorns of roses draws.
I knew I had been warned so I stayed there
bleeding and burning,
swearing to myself as I suffered
that I would never again
give my heart to someone
who would not give me theirs in return.

This summer, three years later,
being around you
means feeling like being able to combust spontaneously
and I cannot forget
the sensation of my skin in contact with yours.
It made me realise
that though I have always loved you,
I started loving you a little bit too much.
You are my every thought.
They say you never make the same mistake twice,
that it is your own stupid fault the second time around.
But if it really was a choice
why then is it
that I spend all my nights these days
pleading with the universe
to let me unlove you.