I was going to write you something
that embodied our love, some
infinitesimal prose about
your name click-clacking off of
my tongue or your eyes
when you're smiling.

I was going to answer all of
the questions that are silently ticking
inside your mind and scrawl
perfect prepositions across the page
so that your hands might
falter as they traced the corners.

I wanted to tell you about
the tug of your presence or
the way that your fingerprints
feel against mine,

but I'm writing this instead,
listing off the beauty that I feel
seeping into my skin and
it doesn't really make sense
but that's just the way it falls
onto the paper, bit by bit.
sad things, serenade me.

I'm only romanticizing
the madness of it all.
I never asked to be
a ******* poet.

how strange; you leave me
hanging on to your words
like parachutes, a smile
dancing across my gratuitous
face; appalachian eyes
the color of melancholy
and mouth of a sailor.

you said, I never thought
that I would miss you
quite this much.
...and my very heart
swooned at the idea of
you, so very far away,
so close to me.

come home to me,
darling, I want to tell you
how much I've missed you.

there are these things like summertime
sadness and frosty windows,
moth wings and the cosmos
and goose flesh and miniature houses
with miniature chairs and

hourglasses and sun-soaked
sheets in the morning and your lips
against mine, hollow bones
and thin blue veins and the
delicacy of synapses and nerves,
reoccurring thoughts and images;
my intimacy with them is
alarmingly sensual;
like the honeysuckle curve
of a bare shoulder,

shadows of hands on walls
and the nectar of your kiss.
things that haunt me and
dance before me,
the epitome
of grace.

i know your demons,
and I kiss them on their pale and
broken foreheads to appease you.
i know the map of your skin,
of your bones, like white gold.

my hands are shaking
as the stars collide and
the dust of them lingers in
your eyelashes; and
i should detest you
by now, but you have
this way of consuming me
with the shadows in your
irises, but i

exhale- a breath like the
million before you came,
a plume of smoke,
radio static.

smoldering desire lights
upon my tongue and
infiltrates my thoughts.

and it is overwhelming,
everything at once;
our love may be a chronic
illness, but
the delirium is
hauntingly
beautiful.

that fizzy chemical
feeling
wraps itself around
my veins.
again. again.

not again.

i am full of blue smoke
and voracious wind voices.
i am full of melancholy
and still-born
dreams.

i miss you,
there, in the mirror.
you shine like
forgotten sun,
laugh like
terrific miniature
gods.

i am acetylene now.
i am neither human
nor beast. i return
to the ashes and ether
from whence I came.

i don’t belong here,
living as a fox among
the pheasants.

bugs and little blue stars
crawl from my eye sockets-
they hiss and pop in the light
and burn my transparent flesh.

glow like phosphorous.
grow like weeds.
bend like my spine.

you are not
permanent.
you will float off
on shiny orbs of soulless
plastic. helium smile,
chrysanthemum hands.

there is a girl made of stardust
and ocean salt, breathing static
into the night sky.
her love, if tended to
with patient hands, would
grow like wild roses across
the trellises of your heart.

she is not born of men;
but a child of luna,
sweet mother.
she is a breeze in July
softly rustling your hair
and the plague of
heatstroke and withered
tongues that swiftly follows.
her touch lingers into
the winter solstice.

she is the wave of sorrow
sweeping over your bones
and the light in your eyes
shining with leftover love;
a shadow dressed in white,
a consummation of grief.

she is a wallflower, a habitual
offender to the gods.
she will nurture you like an infant
and then leave you on your knees,
gasping for redemption.