I'm broken. drunk
Entirely off of you.

Your breath,
mixed with Mine,
Intertwined,

Against a world,
Who never wanted us here.

I want you.

I want to know your favorite color and your middle name.
I want to know about the people you hate and how you found out you loved women.

How do you make your sandwiches?
What foods do you like and can’t pronounce?
What places do you want to see and what words do you know but can’t explain the definition?

Can we cuddle?  
And by cuddle I don’t just mean lay on you, because trust me, I can do that without cuddling. By cuddling I mean let me hold you till you forget your problems and I finally stop talking.

I want to call you baby. I want to sit in a room, with you, listening to jazz music.

I want to feel your pulse and you feel mine,
I want to hear your heartbeat dance to the rhythm of the same songs on the corny playlist on Spotify I made that remind me of you.

The Special Playlist,
(I call it)
The Makeout Playlist,
(you do).

I want to only be about to hear our synced hearts
and the slow songs
and the weight of the world leaving our shoulders
plopping onto the floor with your worries
and the jacket I took off of you when you first came in.

I want you to tease me
because I significantly failed as a former lesbian
because I’ve never watched Orange is the New Black
or The L Word
“You’re not Lesbian certified”
You’ll tell me.

I want to speak to you
In my limited German vocabulary
and watch gay movies
and let you tease me even more
when you find out I can’t sit through *** scenes
even the really gay ones,
and ****** isn’t my thing.
It’s okay though,
Your laugh is cute.

And I want to kiss you.
I want to kiss you like
we’re those ***** *** teenagers
from Romeo and Juliet,
(but with a better ending).
I want to kiss you like
there’s nobody else in the world
And there aren’t people who hate me for liking you
And your family won’t care if you love me because
****,
I want to kiss you.

Let me buy you flowers,
and want to take you on dates.

Let me take you to McDonald’s
and order off the dollar menu because
I believe in treating my girl right
(And I get an employee discount)

let me tell you why I churches make me nervous
and how I don’t believe in God and
why I don’t like birthday parties
And how I want to have my cake and eat it too
Even though I hate cake
And prefer cupcakes,
But nothing is better than cake if that’s you.

I want you to know why I played trumpet for three years then switched to baritone,
I want to know if you’ve ever done drugs and how it felt.
What are your morals and values?
What’s your utopia?

I want to send you goodnight texts and spend hours talking about nothing
And dance offbeat with you because
neither of us could have rhythm to save our lives.
I’ll let you scream fight me when I let you win in games I would destroy you at because you get that goofy smile when you think you’ve won.

Introduce me to your family and I’ll show you mine.
Let me see your baby photos and we can see foreign movies on Netflix.
Let’s go out for coffee and ask deep questions.


I don’t care, okay?
I just want you.

i imagine that you're dead. i imagine that you're laying in a ditch, rotting. it's just easier that way. it's easier for me to believe you've died than to face the harsh reality that you're never coming back. you're gone. if i was honest with myself, i'd stop imagining and notice the new people in your life. how you tense up when i see you because now i write poetry and drink tea and hate myself. we used to do that together, hate ourselves. we used to fit, nail and hammer. at one point, you couldn't push me down further so you left. you became a ***** driver, ******* me over, ******* others over, until there's nothing i can do to help. i don't tell my therapist this. how i've stopped becoming a nail and become someone different. reading poems that don't rhyme anymore because they fit  too well together. i've become a *****. i keep other people together while they ***** me over. i look for broke people and fix them before i fix myself because i'll probably always be like this, this tool for people to use until i stop working or break, but at least they're a little more together than before they met me. i wish i could be honest and tell myself you aren't ever going to change, and blame me for leaving. I wish I could, but i can't.

you looked at me
and cried.
Everyone wants a love poem,
but even those end.

I’ve sat in throngs of people,
between seas and seas,
knowing there’s a small chance
salt gets called by its name
CaCl2 instead.

I’m constantly aware
I am one compound;
full, contradictory,
Knowing people will find
In the ocean of things
More salt as oceans evaporate,
Lifting to clouds,
Till only enough is left for us to swim in.

A little girl,
collects the beautiful things,
the Seashells people always want
—conversation,
joy,
money—
In ziplock bags,
with water and the
handful who can handle it,

And we,
Undesirable
stay in the sea,
Brushing from horizon
to horizon,
until we’re swept up,
Or drown someone.

I camp out in my room
light switch feet away,
my feet,
shaking against my own will.

Your memory plays in black and white,
as if we made a perfect,
tragic film.

Was color ****** out after you left; or
was it never there?

Keys are carried around by you
on a chain
you made from the arteries of my heart.

Too bad the keys
don't fit the
lock anymore.

I changed it.

And when her eyes turned,
brown to blue,
I drowned in them
navigating too far into the oceans

She blamed herself
took matters into her very own
pale
impish
hands

And before they could arrest her,
She buried herself
into the the eyes of her lover,
smudged in soil,

Maybe that's why I loved her.

******* slowly
Time close
to me,
hanging on
my side,
the side I kept
my tattoo.
                                    Buttoning quickly
                                       Tying my shoes,
                                              laced in fear
                                                 &uncertainty.
                                      
                                   A few hours
                                      away from thinking
                                         about who I love


              (My own personal bomb),
  

                                                                                    ...thinking of you.

The subtle cross between intersections, a life of blurriness, through crossed t’s and neatly dotted i’s I removed from the phrase Poetic Form, (trying to spell it without crossing myself back into it).
From lesbianism to manhood,
to cross what being a man means,

I wonder if my own identity is written in pen and everyone wants it typed and edited,
Yet I’ve taken the plastic keys off my computer board and made them into magnets last week,
Setting myself up with stolen magnets stolen blocks,
Putting them in order on my own fridge,
Scrambling them back because there is no order,
They only told you there was so that way you’d sing a song,
But I know now that I can write words, there’s no need for a pre-prescribed song when I’ve written my own,

In my own words.
When I look back and have pages of songs nobody else asked for or decided to write,
When I’m in class and I pocket my songs into stories and my stories under my low grades,
Under my teachers’ requests for MLA format,
I think of that caterpillar I played with in my room when I was six,
And how i thought about how people only wrote about butterflies
And how the caterpillars felt about that,
So when I asked my mother to ask her friend, an author,
If she’d write me into a novel,
Would she ignore me because I was a caterpillar,
Only choosing to open her mouth and write when my story became beautiful and socially acceptable,
When it grew out from the pubescent disliking of itself and stained the sinks of society,
Out of a hot *** of queer and quarantine,
Till the broth of the fluidity of my own being was was down the rabbit hole
Till all that was left was whitewashed spaghetti?

If these songs were anything I could write down again and again,
In pen, ignoring the requests to write neater,
To type faster,
If I put all my work into an envelope I already broke,
Shove it into a mailbox decorated with things people disagree with,
My pages bleeding ink few people can touch without being soaked,
When they ask me what to file me under
I don’t say “minority fiction” anymore

I say file me under “road signs”
At the intersections.
File me under that caterpillar,
In the wheat field,
Next to hydrangeas on the dinner table
A Sunflower in the spring
The harvested Brown Rice,
So when you make me into a meal I didn’t ask for,
I can be at least eaten by the vegans.

I have tried many ways to think of her but
Astronomy was the only way I could write on.
I've tried to comfort her out of despair, but
I couldn't find the words to take her out of pain.
When I heard he made her cry,
I wanted to take the pain out of her,
put them into his face and my fists as
I hit him into the oblivion space we know space to be, and
him see the stars closer than any telescope had seen.
I wouldn't mind being in pain for a little while so
the sun could dry her tears,
she was trying so hard to hide.

Would it be so terrible for me to remind her
how the stars bowed in her presence?
Would It be so terrible for me to show her
nobody sees the stars
and the beauty of night anymore
because they are afraid of her
and the beauty she brings?
I too scared to ask if she knows
how you left her after class
to scream at the universe for
making her believe
she was anything less,
than the closest thing to perfection
the universe has to offer. Does she
know how you've collected books of
nebulas in your heads that show when
she decides to laugh? Does she know
you how hard this is for you, to sit here
and smile and joke like your heart
doesn't break with hers as you see her
in a pain deeper than imaginable and you
know it. It spans across all universes and expands
further than your love of poetry and your longing to
hug her and tell her it's going to be okay, but
you know that's not true,
and you can never make that true.
So you sit here,
and write a love poem never to be read,
because that means something would die inside you
or her
if you shared how much of the universe you could give to her
how much of the universe
and the stars
and the planets
and the comets
and meteors
you could shower her with
if she knew how beautiful she was....

I drink you up,
as if I
could drink
to the bottom
of the bottle
of whatever you told me you are.

You taste sweet,
like the type of chocolate
your eyes remind me of.

I touch my mouth
with my tongue,
The feeling of something sweet
hasn't been there a long time.
It feels like my first cavity.

I touch my heart with feeling,
I touch my spine with fear,
I let you win in a debate,
I wanted to make sure
I hadn't gone soft.

You look beautiful.

A trunk of stories fill my comforters with tears
as I marvel over the letters I've never
sent to all the women I adored. I think of
you as wax drips off the candle of time. I
suppose you loved this scent.

Mama
I’m afraid to die alone.

I’m so scared to die alone.

I’m not afraid to die,
I’m a little afraid to exist,

I know I don’t live.

Yet,
I’m still
Alive.

i wear more black
Now,
than i did
at my first funeral.
Who died?



Me?

and when i leave you'll wonder why you stopped drinking coffee. you'll wonder why you've picked up a rather large pack of tea at the grocery store instead of what you're going to eat that week. you'll look around in an empty house and wonder why you're pantry is so full but you'll only eaten delivered pizza and the tea i left behind when i packed up and never looked back.