Wilt my lungs
I’ll breathe in bitter bloom
And fill my chest with concrete tombs

At twenty one I exhaled tar
And covered my birthday cake

Ribs for the skyline
This city built a church round my heart
Before some gutter punks spray painted the side of the stained glass
With the suicide rates of middle-class citizens

Nothing has been the same since

When I was young
I was raised on Disney
And taught that my bones were living things

At thirteen years old
I nestled a heart within the clouds and smoke of my chest
It suffocated to death

I’ve never broken a bone
But I’ve trailed plenty of marrow

I felt him between my thighs and my heart sang songs my mind didn't even know it knew.
Warm and honeyed thoughts fill me until I am full and I am ready to concede defeat and open myself for his occupation.

But doesn't it always?
The body delights in new and welcome sensations and the head creates them.
I could easily dismiss it all as a ballet of chemical reactions and well placed hands, profoundly meaning

"Nothing".

Because everyone knows when the heat dies down, and the temperature drops, when the passion has waned like the moon, and the tide falls, only the bare bones of you are left and there are only calcium pillars to protect the flame.

Because everyone who has loved, even as a passing thought, has been left in the wake of warring bodies to observe the aftermath.
Was the tenderness making way for lust?
Did every kiss have a drop of hard truth imbued that I missed?
Were his hands caressing shallow intentions into my sensitive skin?
Did I miss the message?
Or were my eyes too open in awe, that they had closed on the casual way his hands and lips met my own?

"And what had all this been for?" Is the question that dances on the outskirts of my mind, while the meeting of my thighs still burned, and my heart had descended into free fall.

Satisfaction? Fear? Gratification? Doubt?

Love?

The worst feeling, of course, not being betrayal, confusion, shame, or loss, but plainly, uncertainty.

Nothing hurts the heart worse than not knowing.

I hope she knows what she's getting herself into.
I hope she knows what your heart sounds like after a night of
comparisons between her handwriting and mine.                                                                                                                                      
I want you to know that I am through with dumbing
myself down to fit inside your god complexed hands.

Don't tell me I never tried to save us.
I wrote you songs with knives on my palms
and your ears were anything but listening.

I had a dream about you every night since you told me
you didn't know how to love anything with a heartbeat and hope.
I started sleeping again when you came back, and oh when you came back...                                                                                                                          

I am not sorry that my temper is as short as the lifespan of us.
I am not sorry that your smile is the only one that ever made me
want to wake up in the morning.
I am all pain and long long longing and she has always been
a storm with a heart dead set on your stillness.
Our problem is that I never stop shaking long enough for the dust to settle.

I've been writing with the same pen for four years and
you still only recognize my words when she plays them back.

Let it not be confused, foggy or incomprehensible-
you were the one.
Until the one became none and I stopped being a number when you stopped counting miles.

I hope she loves harder than a woman with dementia, relearning parts of you every morning
in the places you reserved with my first and your last- maybe next time.

Maybe next time, maybe next life will be different.
Maybe I'll be patient, stronger, I'll stop covering my smile. You'll stop pretending to be in love.
I will stop shaking and the dust will settle and her poetry will make you sick.
Her poetry will sprout evening primroses and she won't know that you always fall asleep before midnight
or that you're allergic to flowers that bloom when the sun is down.

I used to think that love was having billions of elaborate words and beautiful phrases to describe someone’s beauty and how much you worship them.
I used to think that love was a tragic, oh so tragic, drama where heartbreak was inevitable and once it occurred you were set free. You were then freely allowed to write even more melancholic poems about how handsome their eyes are when they smile.

But now I know that it isn’t about writing lovely poems of how breathless they leave you; it’s about the feelings they leave you with that you cannot conjure or create words for.
But now I know that is isn’t about a grand sacrifice, a grand martyrdom, a grand abandonment of your tears and blood for their smile; it’s about compromising between fire & water, peace & war, the sun & the moon, to find a balance in which both factors can coexist.

But now I know that it isn’t about having an ocean of words you can use to describe the color of their eyes; it’s about being awestruck, with no existing adjective that could possibly capture how they make you feel, how godlike they appear to your eyes.

But now I know that it isn’t about being able to bring forth a tidal wave of glorious prose or soliloquy on their posture and grand gestures of self-pride; it’s about being speechless, where no phrase or paragraph or page will describe their tiny perfect gestures done in your name.

Love is allowing yourself to become so lost in someone, that it doesn’t matter what you have to say.
It’s as easy as letting your actions speak in place of your normally exquisite torrent of words.
It’s as easy as letting someone into your head & heart, so that they may share your feelings, for simply telling them with inadequate words would not be enough.
It would be so easy, to become swept away in the tide of emotion brought on by their presence.

That is to say, love isn’t easy.
Relationships aren’t easy.
Communication isn’t easy.
Trusting isn’t easy.
Love comes with a price.

Love that stirs apathetic crowds, love that launches a thousand ships, love that stops a million tears, love that changes the evil greedy world, love that rights wrongs, comes with a price. 

You must compromise.
You must bend but not break.
You must explore but not stray.
You must fight and communicate.
You must cry rivers of tears and break down the highest walls.
You must trust.

It is hard, it is the hardest thing you will ever do, but it must be done.

It is hard to trust so fully, trust so openly, that their love is what you exist on. It keeps you blindly shuffling through the dark, occasionally bumping heads and hurting one another.
It keeps you trying and pushing for more, because there are light spots in the dark, gloriously warm and inviting light spots where no shadows will ever exist.

It keeps you breathing, it keeps you surviving, it makes you human.

Trusting is hard, opening up is hard, we’re all just afraid of someone leaving us in the end, after the dust has settled and the battle has raged...right?
We’re all just afraid of letting someone close enough to see all of our nasty imperfections.
We’re all just afraid of letting someone close enough to decide that they do not like what lies underneath the beginnings of early affection.
We're all just afraid of letting someone close enough to show them each and every scar and smile, to explain each and every story of why they are there.
We’re all just afraid of rejection; and loving someone, and having someone love you in return, doesn’t vanquish this fear over night. 

I used to think that love was all winsome words and delightful thoughts and alluring formulas of letters.
But now I know that love is not all roses and forget-me-nots, yet it is not this dark twisted creature spewed from the broken hearts of young lovers.

Love is like every other valuable in this world, it is rare and it is to be treasured. It is to be held closely and grown and protected.
It is to be nourished and pruned and weeded.
It is a garden where only the most beautiful flowers may grow, if given the proper attention and care.
Yet, it is also to be treated like a wild beast: beautiful, and free, and pure, and dangerous.
It is a feeling of the world, of the earth, of the dirt.
It is wild and untamed and can turn it’s darkest face towards you at any moment.

Love is so much more than a poem, or a haunting melody, or a word meant to label some unreachable feeling.

Love is not easy, not always gentle, and never fully graspable.

And why write about things we cannot fully describe?

I used to think that love was having billions of elaborate words and beautiful phrases to describe someone’s beauty and how much you worship them.
I used to, and still think, that love is easy to define and clearly explain, but it is not.

Love, like every other cosmic and easily misconstrued notion of human existence, is not tied to any phrase, paragraph, or page.

I remember the night you sang Objects in the Mirror to me on the phone. 



I never thought that it would feel this way.

You never taught me how to heal the pain.

I wish you caught me on a different day, when it was easier to be happy.

I kinda find it strange, how the times have changed.

*

I remember how we used to talk about love, like it was an institutionalized little child, drug down from what glory it used to hold; how it used to transcend time and knowledge and beauty and all other emotion.



Someone like you is so hard to find.

I remember that you thought I was put together perfectly. I still don’t understand how you ever reached that end of the spectrum, completely opposite my own view. I still don’t understand how everyone around me sees someone that I don’t see when I look in the mirror. I’m anti-altruistic and unintelligent and completely guilt ridden and not at all beautiful.


All I ask is don’t you worry, I won’t hurt you, don’t you worry.



I remembered how much stock I put in you. I remember how you promised you wouldn’t hurt me, because you had been put through the same wringer as I. I remember how you just unattached yourself one day, on the bias that it was my fault. You stranded me. Probably for another, prettier, girl. 



Listen to me I will set you free,

He ain’t gonna break your heart again.



And I could never figured out what that particular line meant in the scheme of things, but I realize now, as you’re trying to drift back into my life with the drive of a listless breeze, you were setting me up for the next heartbreak. 
After all, all my life really is, is a string of heartbreak.



Go through the worst to reach the ecstasy.

Wish we could go and be free, once baby you and me,

We could change the world forever, and never come back again.


 
I remember the feeling that bloomed in my heart when I realized someone like you cared about someone like me. That someone like you wanted to fix someone like me. Then I reached the conclusion that depression and mental illness isn’t attractive. That you were drawn to the prettier parts of me that resembled tarnished silver, in the hopes that you would have time to break in your silver polish in the spare time and privacy of your awful little home town.



You don’t havta cry. 

And mend a broken hearted girl if you can, I don’t expect you to be capable. 

You have the world right in your hands, your responsibility is unescapable.



I realized that boys don’t like sad girls, but you could see what I could be. I thought you wanted to help me and fix me, but eventually shouldering a burden that isn’t your own gets too heavy to carry. It gets heavier and heavier through the crying, sleepless nights that you would guide me through with your lantern, which became duller each time I needed saving.



Don’t even say you’re about to end it all,

Your life is precious ain’t no need to go and **** yourself. 


Then you left.

On my watch.

On my fault.

On something that wasn’t really my fault.



I promise that I’ll be a different man,

Give me the chance to go and live again.



But here you are with nonchalance and no apologies for the tears wasted on you. 

There may be another boy toying with my broken pieces, fitting me together because he can see the beauty you saw. 

But here you are pretending you still care and still find me beautiful.

There may be beauty in this other boy who helps me, who is just as broken as me, another boy who shares my pain in what I’ve never gotten.

But here you are rehashing memories of nights spent crying over a song.



You don’t have to cry.

Let’s leave it all in the rearview.



But here I am, telling you that broken girls give second chances.



Let’s leave it all in the rearview.

But here I am, telling you that I’m halfway mended.



Let’s leave it all in the rearview.



But here I am, telling you that for me, once you’ve left you cannot re-enter.



Leave it all in the rearview.