is it different?
do you love me?
do our conversations play out
over and over,
in your mind?
and do you also find,
for days after we meet,
that you're completely useless?
rendered incapable of anything
except writing
the same poem
again and again?

an inexplicable
and
unknowable
truth

What is it about love and belonging? You don’t belong to me, and at the same time, what else could you be but mine? What else could I be but yours? I belong to you. You hold a part of me that no one else can.

Later
that night,
I
touch my
skin,
the way
that
you did.

having a cigarette in the alley
wonderful really
but maybe not as wonderful
if it weren't an excuse
to leave the party

she told me they are the in between stages. when one era of your life is over, but the next hasn't yet begun. it's a place of change, of uncertainty, of questions. of waiting. i thought of god for some reason. maybe the absence of god is actually the presence of him. maybe it's the spaces between words that matter the most. maybe it's the way the piano sounds when it's not being played. maybe truth only makes itself known in the absence of answers. after all, plants do grow in sidewalk cracks.

new beginnings. correct beginnings. things that were supposed to end. a perfect last sentence, a book with no desire to be reread. reshoveling snow off my driveway, rewinding to the time and place it fell from the sky, lighter than rain and about as heavy as your heart.

honesty.

for when shovels give way to snow plows. for when it all freezes over. for when it thaws, and then begins to decay. for when the flowers grow in the sidewalk cracks, the ones that no one bothered to mend. for spring. for that color red, the most accurate one there is. the one you can hear. the one that only shows up in sunsets and tubes of paint. for the day you fell out of love with her.