Timid smiles
Soft hellos
I loved you,
And I told you so

when nothing is certain,
he is

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

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."

I hope you learn how to say I love you and mean it
I hope you learn.
I hope you learn.
I hope you make it better for her,
I hope you remember you are not mine
And I was never yours -
And finally, finally
I'm ready to find
Exactly what I'm looking for.

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

I feel sadness in my skin.
You used to make me glow

We have eighty years in a good life.
The moments will pass just the same,
Whether I'm traveling this road
Or warm and encircled in your arms.
Either way, I'm watching the sun turn
Into a stained glass window
As it slowly fades to night.
I'm looking at the constellations
Sprinkling across the sky
And the city lights distantly sweeping
The plains in glitter.
I'm miles away,
But you're on my mind.

Ten pm,
You're brushing your teeth
In preparation for bed
Have I said I love you yet?

You are my every waking thought
I swear time collapses when I think of you
Melting me down
Memorizing parts of me I forgot
All I want to do is be with you

Can we honor the life that comes
Without honoring the life from
Whence it came?
When life becomes,
Is she the widened legs of shame?
For my own mother made me
As an extension of her own pleasure
I owe my blood
To her sexuality
For hers is the life
From whence I came.
And when we hold a child with high regard;
Revere the blood that pushes it veins,
Do we give the honor to its own heart
Or do we thank the blood
From whence we came?

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 don't know what I want.
I want to change.
I want to feel a thousand things,
I want to feel everything at once;
I want to feel nothing at all.

I want to hold your hand

I want lazy mornings that last until dusk.
I want to run a million miles.
I want empty fields!
I want big cities!
I want towers and towers,
Taller than my doubts.
I want silent ghost towns,
I want emptiness,
I want to be whole.

I want to know you

I want to make things different.
I want to make things better.
I want change.
I want to stir hurricanes in the air above close minds,
And I want nothing less than to be contentious.
Silent and unspoken.  
I want to be part of everything,
Everything at once.

I want to belong only to you

I believe in keeping my eyes closed.
For when the pain is uncovered,
And starts to seep in
When the secrets are whispered
By paper and pen
When the nightmares arise
In monsters and men,
I can look at each wound
And close up the skin
I can lock up my safe,
Whisper "never again".

I let you drive 100 miles per hour
Because I know what it's like
To want to go so fast
You might die.
I wish I was an atheist,
So I could believe if I fell asleep
In your arms tonight,
I might never be revived,
Never have to face the grace
That saved the twisted hopelessness
Of myself.
And as I held you,
I half died knowing
I was half asleep in borrowed arms.
For the rest of the night
I prayed to feel nothing at all.

He requires less sleep than I,
Brighter Eyes
And at the very least,
I kept myself alive to meet him.

I want to play with your hands
And teach you how to dance
I want to kiss you in the morning
When I can barely feel my lips

I feel like you could scar me
Like I've never known an entire ocean
And I feel alone
I feel like my insides are made of cold water
And broken matter
I feel blue like I've never known.

If anyone is asking,
I remember being buried under bushes of leaves,
Arms outstretched,
Reaching for streams of dappled light.
I remember the glimpse of moon in his galactic eyes -

But we bend toward the light that heals us.
So when I felt the pull of a greater tide,
I gasped aloud and shifted sides,
meristems beaming for softer light.

I want to hold you inside my hands
And carry you with me.
I want you to see mornings in full bloom
I want you to see open fields of tired harvesters,
Wiping sweat off their brows.
I want you to smell the dirt and rain and feel the mud against your calloused hands
Because you'll never have sunflowers without the sunburns.
You can't wait until August for basil and herbs to stem from fictional roots.
You have to wake up at 5 a.m. to move pipes,
You have to blister your toes on the hundred degree concrete,
You have to work through pain and anxiety to feel warmth
To feel new
To feel anything at all.
If you want a garden full of roses,
You have to plant them.

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

I also know
Pain
Makes us grow

Your hands linger on me
I can feel them
Why can I feel them?
Can you feel mine?

Where am I on your body?
Where am I on your heart?
Where am I on your mind?

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.

Lover,
You know I
Breathed you
Like the sky

I'm driving fast down the freeway,
Wondering where in the world you are,
Thinking you're probably in the dressing room
******* some other girl,
While I'm barely getting dressed in the morning,
Wishing I was back in bed
With my head on your chest
And my ear to your heart,
Listening to your heart beat
Like the pulse of the still breathing.

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 wrote to tell you your eyes
Aren't quite blue
My mind isn't quite neutral
I am a tidal wave,
A thunderstorm,
I awoke your nightmares
You found sublimity in my chaos

You were seventeen
You wanted to badly to be loved,
To be noticed,
And I wanted to give that to you.
I still do.

I want the stars to warm and guide you,
To take you home.
I want you to laugh
And not feel empty.
I want my love to ring in your eardrums;
I want you to hear birds chirp,
And really listen.
I want the sunshine to feel like gold
As it fills the pavements of your mind.  
I want you to feel
everything everything everything.
And when it's all gone,
When it's all empty,
And you feel likes nobody loves you,

I do.

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'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

I love you every day
and every night
and all the spaces between the moments that I breathe,
Through the system that my heart uses to pump oxygen to my body.
I can't help feeling you in the rose on my cheeks.
In and out of consciousness,
whispering through the phone.
I loved you all along,
I loved you all along

It feels good to sit with you
And watch the light bend
From the cotton candy sky.
The colors are bursting through
Their horizontal zipper.
You take me home;
I fall asleep
To the soundtrack of blurred colors,
And I dream about you all night long.
You're the only playlist
I can keep alive

At least
You scratched my back
Before I watched you leave
Maybe if I scratched yours,
You would have stayed

it
still
hurts

I colored this whole page outside the lines
Just to prove you can't keep me in binds.

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

Hearing the fuzz of the static between the lines as you laugh nervously: It feels like waking up to a child who has found your acrylic paints, who is brushing hasty strokes of posey on your cheeks -

Like half-heartedly composing your poise on a river rock, holding your center, knowing if you lose your steady, you have to fall,

Fall into something that feels like first breath of air you breathe when you step off a train, knowing yesterday is gone, knowing the person you are now is ready to embark.

I lay here
Cursing my skin
For reminiscing the days
Where I forgot where I end
And you begin

As far away as I am,
I only want him to feel definite.
So until the moments in between time blend into the crashing tide of eternity,
I'll be there -
Scratching love notes into his back on lazy Sundays

All night, I thought about
Calling you on the phone
Because your voice saws me open
And breaks all my bones

I'm sorry I made you the saddest person alive
But you made me broken inside.
I'm the saddest happy can be.
You touched my vulnerability
You memorized each part of me.
You ripped me open,
You dug in,
And I let you

Will I see you In every starry night?

early morning,
quiet runs
feet on the pavement,
as quiet as the warmth
I made for myself

I want to be so righteous,
I'm only looked down upon
Because I'm on my knees.

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

My hands
Hold
All of the mistakes
I have made.

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