The lines I write in my head make sense
Until my tears smear the ink
And muddle all my musings.
I let them bleed out of my fingertips
Til I'm left with ink blots and a tired heart

I want to be all the love
          Your heart pumps
Though open drains
          And pipes
I want to be the one
          To keep you up at night

I'll sneak around as much as I have to
I'll break my back and bury my bones in the backyard
So long as yours are buried there too.
When I was a kid I thought love was this empty thing
I'm letting the words come to my page as quickly as I think them
Not pausing to be rational
Or plan my escape like I always do
I don't freaking want to go anywhere
I want to freaking be with you

I will love you with all the blood my heart pumps in my entire life
I will love you through every moment I feel my sternum shaking
My eyelids blinking
The entirety of my being quaking
You're as blue As the dark I feel as I fall asleep

I hope my skin was ebony
I hope the dust settles over you like white Sunday school chalk
I hope you keep me like religion
And hold me in your heart
Never acknowledging it on the surface
But Counting on me somewhere within

I'll never write like F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Maybe I'll never write at all,
Or ever again,
Because after the day I met him
The Stars parted like the Red Sea
And God let himself in,
Telling me it was His turn to take the pen.
So I laughed and handed it over
Knowing everything I had written was translucent and flimsy and meaningless

Things changed the night I cried on rolling hills,
And I thought of mauve and rosy skies,
Just like my favorite writer did,
Knowing the clouds would never the flower he brought me at my show,
And I cried and cried until the sun swelled up in the sky,
Reminding me I'm alive

It was six brilliant months and things all made sense.
I told him about how I loved pearls
And he told me he loved the ones his grandmother wore.
He told me about his favorite constellation,
And I didn't tell him I loved it even more

I wrote dumb poetry that rhymed and rhymed
Because everything made too much sense for it to not.
Every I matched with an e
Every heartbeat in iambic pentameter
And everything Made sense.

It wasn't until the ends finally loosened
And the strings broke
And everything fell utterly apart that I realized
I am not meant to be like F. Scott Fitzgerald, and skies are not meant to be rosy.

"Show me a hero, and I'll show you a tragedy."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

Well they'll tell you my skin was so white,
I should've been an angel

And I guess they're right,
But it was never too hard to put my
Heart in a cage

I was ravenously looking for love
I was ravenously looking for love

He said he could tame me by scratching my back
Because behind the layers of skin and bones
There was a lot of emptiness looking to be touched

I was ravenously looking for love
I was ravenously looking for love

Well I found it where it shouldn't have been
And I felt things I shouldn't have felt
Now I find myself in all the old places
Feeling like I lost a hundred parts of myself

And I ravenously lost my love,
And I ravenously lost my love

I never told you about Holden
I never even finished The Catcher in the Rye
And actually all I wanted to tell you was
How I related to how bleak he was
And I think you got the point,
I think you got the point when I told you
I might die
I'm esther greenwood
I'm Holden
I'm every broken character
I'm a walking classic novel
Manic depression

And you told me if I died,
That would be the worst thing
But I can't help if I'm falling from the weight
Of falling figs from my hope tree

Tucked in quiet corners,
I'll keep you locked in spaces
My mind makes up
To convince me to go to sleep.

I showed you the dream box
My brother gave me for Christmas
I cried talking about the note he had written
I cried telling you about the maps he had hand glued inside
To remind me wherever I go,
My family would be with me
I thought about the rivers and roads
The valleys and mountain tops
The blue papers described
I pointed with my finger where my sisters belonged,
Where my mother lived,
Where I could find my brother
I realized there were no actual pinpoints,
That my father could move anywhere on the map,
And that there were things on the map I hadn't given a name to quite yet
I want to put you there,
Pin you down,
Give you a name the same way I'd given one to the rest of my family
I guess I'm writing this to ask you a question
I'm asking you to stay

You were always my favourite
I knew how you wanted to kiss me
And be with me
I felt each flare you sent ablaze into the night sky
I felt it sting me and I felt the burn
As tears crept from my eyes
There's so much about you
That I never wanted to lose;
So much so that I nearly let you
Break my knees so I'd never be free
Even tangled in your snare I asked to stay
I just wanted to stay
I only wanted to stay

Sorry you grew up feeling lonely
Sorry you had to cover up the fact that
You're so desperate for love,
You'll find it in any blonde
That treats you like you're worth nothing

You were worth something to me

I'm going to get married you know,
I'm going to see the world like you told me to
(But not for you)
And I'm going to get married,
But not to you

I knew it was going to hurt
And I let it.

I also know
Pain
Makes us grow

I am strong when I am sad.
But this is not how I feel.
If my dust-speckled, sunflower eyes
Are your heaven,
Then you know the things I see
When I'm alone
Like grainy black and white films

You see, when I was with you
And we were alone
And the lights were dim
And everything had settled,
There was no time for dust to
Sparkle across my doubts
It was only us

Now I have only time,
Time to think about your cornflower eyes
Time to think about the way it felt to be kissed
Time to wonder if I'm wasting all my time
And I swore I needed this,
I swore I needed time

Will I see you In every starry night?

I'm thinking about being pressed against you
Like the wilted cherry blossom between wrinkled pages in my diary
I remember being ten thousand feet up
On a silver plane to the sea,
thinking about the pressure evaporating from my ankles down to my toes as we descended to the coast.
As I see tall silver buildings make easy,
Fleeting statements
I think I feel the pressure in my feet again,
a pressure I never felt with you

Where is the place where the numbers begin to change?
Tell me why the small of my back is the only open space
The place where hands find themselves
Hands dance fine lines
Hands dance intertwined
Hands in tangled hair
Hands open to fill the gaping spaces in the air
Hands changing numbers
Hands changing names
Where is the place where the numbers begin to change?

I'll teach you to drive
You teach me to paint lilies
We'll learn about stars

5:16 pm
First I'm thinking of roadside adventures
Parked out on a hill,
Somewhere out where the snow is melting
Where cars don't drive,
Where there's no speed limit signs or
Traffic lights
There's only railroads and grain silos
Places where we used to watch the stars
Places where we were young and reckless
Places where we watched the moonrise
5:19 pm
Now I'm thinking of slow dancing
In a high school cafeteria
I'm thinking of you kissing my shoulder
You writing my name in Arabic
You holding my hand when we're walking
Up to your house
You
5:21 pm
I keep thinking
maybe if I remember these all vividly,
You'll remember too

I didn't mean to make the stars
Glaze over their dull eyes
And bound a lifetime of regret in me.
I didn't mean to concoct a remedy
Of my own brewed and sugar-coated blood.
I just wanted luster
Without the sky screaming
I must have lust

it
still
hurts

You and I are piles of skin and bones
Wrapped in linens to protect us
From getting holes
I'll follow you through your ever venture
Blue eyes pierce me like the icicles we strolled past
As I fell marvelously in love with you
Golden tips to the nuts and bolts
Of a crying, perfect, hopeless disease
I'm calling this sensation what it is
(Remind me to tell you in the morning.)

blotted out the words that didn't make sense;
you made the blots into depictions of our baroque mindset

It's nights like this
When I'm alone in bed:
There's no stress and nobody around,
Nothing to pretend to be.
I'm just me: nocturnally silent
And scared to death of the future,
knowing you're out there in the world
Couting on me to make the right choice.
This is when I know I'm ready.

I don't even know who I am anymore.
I used to count on my hands to do
The right thing,
My tongue to say
The right thing,
My heart to feel
The right thing.
Suddenly everything is jumbled;
I realize maybe it was months ago
When things started to change,
When the vines began to wrap around themselves
In my head.
Nothing quite makes sense the way you do.
I don't know how to verbalize my thoughts
Or even analyze them so I can tell myself
What would be
The right thing.

Underneath all the things I say
And underneath the facade of it all,
There's part of me that finally feels like it fits in
With the other parts of me
After being lost for probably years.
I like the way you scrunch your nose
When you smile,
And the way you laugh when you kiss me.
I'm so used to being focused
I forgot that sometimes being interrupted is
Precisely
What I need.
I don't want to be frustrated anymore,
And I'm realizing I was frustrated
For far too long.
I was right back in September when I said
You made me feel like I wasn't so tied down.
And your laugh,
It's like I'm waking up from a dream,
Remembering that things are better
Outside of my head.
Out here,
With you,
This feels like the right thing.

when your sinking thoughts drag you down,
i want to be the one to wipe the tears
from your cheeks

I'm too tired lately to describe my emotions in full. But I'll say this: just know as I'm falling asleep tonight, I'll be thinking of your blue eyes staring up at the sky. And every winter from here on forth, the first snowfall is dedicated to you. Every time I see those dazzling flakes cascade through the foggy breeze, I'll sing Earth Angel in my head and think of your eyelashes catching the frosted lace. I'll think of those same lashes brushing my cheek and I'll think of your quiet laugh telling me how you love butterfly kisses. I'll think over you and hundred times over before I lean in and kiss you right in the wintertime madness, because there's no way I'm spending another snowfall without you.

feel like my story was written for you to read
I don't want to separate you from the parts of me that make me breathe
And I kept feeling like you were somewhere in the world
I had no idea that the world was actually somewhere inside you

I'm not one of the lucky ones
who gets to fill the void
I just sit and let it sink deeper
Some days I don't even stand
cuz I can't stand you not holding my hand
all I've got is this pen
and these words I've written.
And you've got six hundred lives
you could live
and the only one I've got is just pretend
Because all I want
Is to lay asleep on your chest
And spend lazy afternoons scratching your back

It would feel right to be near you and hear the little drummings that carry life under your skin
I'd like to belong where they fit in
Will we ever be satisfied or is it too hard to believe that were blind?
I don't know where your mind turns in alleyways of abstract thought but I want to be there with you. Its all I've ever wanted, to understand the cadence of your skin

Everytime I hear that old song,
I picture the lyrics tattooed on your skin
And embedded all over
My every waking thought
Its like those calloused hands
Had more to say in the fleeting moments
That they held mine
Than I have ever heard in my life

I awoke to nothing but white and
The sound of my mother calling my name
Smoke, I felt it in my lungs
It burned me as it came

I awoke to nothing but white and
The sound of the phoenix calling my name
A bird and my mother
Their call was the same

I awoke to nothing but white
Cleansed by fire
I arose from the flame

We spend so much time looking at faces,
Sparkling blue eyes like icicles
Dripping from rooftops,
Lips curved like crimson brushstrokes
Chins formed like the rugged edge of a cliff
But we don't talk about the quiet parts of ourselves,
The line that God drew down our backs
That separates the halves of our whispered dimesnsions,
Like how I want to stand beside him and let our arms brush sleeve against sleeve,
Maybe pinky against pinky
Because in this I feel wanted
And how you want to touch my arms
And my shoulders
And my neck
And all the space of my back
Because in my skin you feel wanted

I didn't mean to make the stars bleed from the palms of their hands.
You just touched me so gently,
I forgot what it was like to tip toe
On the shoreline
Where my wrongdoings match the tide of my indifference.
And I'm sure somewhere inside the caverns of my chaotic senses,
There's an image of you that stirs the wavelengths of my consciousness,
And gives me the breath that revives my sleeping pulse.

You told me how my Polaroid works,
How the chemicals press themselves
Across the film
And how the light developes the colors.

You told me how to fix the AC
In my old beat up cougar,
And how to ***** on the broken door
That fell from my entertainment center.

You even told me I could fix myself,
As if you ever knew a thing about living
With a drum in your bones so loud
It awakes you in a cold sweat
Just when you thought
Monsters didn't exist anymore.

But you couldn't tell me
Why you can't mend your heartstrings,
Why your skin is always calloused
And scraped and rough
(Like a man's, you said,
Like a real man's).

You couldn't tell me the first step
To the easy fix of mending
Everything you've broken.
All you could tell me was
"I don't feel pain.
I don't feel pain."

I'm tired, honey
I want to kiss you in the bottom
Of my blankets
Make you bloom like the sunflowers,
Palms open towards the sky
Singing "I'm ready for you, life;
I'm ready for you, life."

Part of me believes it's all fiction, the way you touched the small of my back and pulled me in like we were magnets. And the other half of me walks the streets of my bare and empty pages, staring at unmarked trains, wishing I could fill those pages with our story and the trains with our initials tied in a heart. I want to be a character in make believe; I want your hand right in mine like a timeless saga. I want fiction to be real and I want the two sides of me to be pulled together in the spine of a paper back romance.

I've found that I never want to sleep. This is nothing new -
I just miss hearing your voice 
In the early hours of the morning,
So deep in the night 
Even the wind ceases 
To shake the trees
And stir the quiet leaves. 
I miss having someone 
During this hour, 
Someone to remind me 
There is life beyond my wide eyes.

It's one thirty p.m.,
And twelve hours ago, 
I was half-asleep on the couch,
Wishing I could be more
Than one foot in
And one foot out.

Her hips were poetry 
When she walked,
Leaving the room hushed
And breathless;
Gazing in awe

Her lips were poetry 
When she sang;
Clearer than the birds
And prettier than the stars
And bolder than the moon
And softer than the night 

Her eyes were poetry
When her brows crinkled
In delight
And her lids fluttered
In fatigue
And her irises sparkled
In passion

And the way she spoke
And the way she did
And the way she was,
It was all poetry to me.

You know 
When you see someone
And their eyes are Hazel
Or their hair is strawberry blonde
And you don't know what name 
To give it or what color to say it is?
Well that's how I feel about you

Maybe I loved the stars too much
And I fell in love with damaging 
My vital organs. 
My lungs for my loss of breath,
Choking back months of tears. 
My mind for distorting thoughts of you,
Thinking you were the stars themselves. 
My stomach for the inflammation of butterflies,
And subsequently their disease. 
And you know how you broke my heart.

I fell in love with
round around the edges
soft smiles
whispered and tender affections
hugs wider than the ocean
fresh kisses
tasting something so new
and that is why
now you've become sharper
firmer and worn out
your smiles are always the same
your hugs are weak
because you believe you'll never lose me
and i'm no longer in love

Maybe it bores you
how I drone on about
my firm belief in
the oxford comma,
but I'll always care
about the propper maintenance of a tuba
because I know how you spend your days
in your grandpa's shop
repairing the broken instruments
but not your broken heart

You are the hell
That ***** me in
And spits me out.
You are the pain in my chest,
The piercing scream,
The fistful of doubt.
We are not the elements
That chemically combine.
You are not the one
Who sends shivers
Down my spine.
I'll never love you.
And I never did.

I remember 
I remember the way you'd speak, 
Eyes reaching for the sky
As if there were something up there
Worth stretching for. 

I remember the way you'd touch, 
Holding me so tightly,
All the shards of my tattered soul 
Seemed like they'd never break again. 

I remember how you whispered
in my ear - 
Always in it's fullness and never lazy- 
I love you.

I remember footsteps asking why,
My crippled hands gasping for air,
Counting losses with each Breath,
As if there was anything
Worth reaching for.

I remember your touch so gentle
The way only Mean can be -
And all my pieces floated in air, 
A silently screaming silhouette 
Feigning defined. 

I remember whispering in your ear
As honestly and with as much fullness
As I could bear
I love you.
I wish you hadn't asked me why. 
That's the only thing 
I don't remember.

I wish I could 
Crawl inside her ear
And tunnel through to her brain
And remind her everyday
How much she is holding in her arms.

I wish I could
Swim through her veins 
Pulse inside her like blood
Rush through her heart
And make a place in there
For all the love you've given. 

I wish my words
Crawled through your ears
Filled your mind with thoughts
Of endless wonder
Pulsed through your veins
Touched your heart 
And made you believe.

It hurts worse to feel
the ache Of your bones
Than to feel
The crushing cravings of my own.

You were the first to see me so exposed.
It was innocent then -
Or maybe it was just foolish.
Either way it was raw and real;
The way love is supposed to be
And the way love is
Before we dig out our masks
And dance it in masquerades.

You used to look at me in the eye.
You used to clutch me
In the palms of your open hands.
I was naked
And yet I did not feel vulnerable;
I felt seen.

Now you paint over my eyes.
You paint beautiful things -
You always were an artist -
But with your paint you cover me.
You cover me so I cannot be seen.
You cover me with your colors
And now I do feel vulnerable.

This is me loving you. 
This is my love serving as a buoy
A little reminder
That you can never let yourself swim
Further than our tender hearts can bear

This is me loving you. 
This is my love serving as a life preserver
A little reminder 
That you can never let yourself drown 
When I am diving in to catch you 
(Always)

This is me loving you. 
This is my love attempting to save you.