I love listening to peoples heart beats in the street
through cold cotton shirts
and tears streaming down their collars around their ribs like hugs they couldn't find.
Her home made rain pulling her clothes like weights to the groun
amplifying the cracked rhythm of a princess who lost her crown.
trying to take it back
take back the broken glass under the streetlights
Sharpie notes on her arm to remind her of a love she has never know
Flirting with death like some yellow paint lines will keep her safe
from all the broken hearts she'll have
all the nights alone hiding in the dark so she doesn't get hurt
all the days when she is her worst enemy.
She is like a lighter pushed up to a jar of kerosene
Waiting to burn up the photograph of her life.
Singing black love poems and drinking
Red wine like its enough to warm up her blue blood.
She likes to hold her breathe to remind herself that she is still in love with life.
A life lived with seven billion other people that are nothing but characters on a broken window.
The crowd of hollow dreams that are still full enough to rip their seams.
A menagerie of marionet bones getting pulled through life waiting to be brave enough to break their strings
Or waiting for their knight in shining jeans and cardigans to rescue them from real life.
Tell them that it isnt always a constant night of long roads with too many houses and too few homes.
listening to that girls heartbeat like it will never flat line
Cause life needs rain to grow and nobody needs a crown to be worth a kingdom.
And broken glass takes beautiful photos
Sharpie is just temporary cause
She should already know that Ill tell her I love her every day
double yellow lines are there to keep her safe from going the wrong direction
She doesnt need photographs to prove she has a life worth living
She sings black love poems because she doesnt like to romanticize romance
She is more then a little lighter fluid
she is a firework that explodes with nothing more and nothing less the beauty

Im sorry you are so temporary
you are like ghost fading through the walls
writing I love you on the pain with ashes
soft words written with death
im sorry we were nothing more than ashes
I am sorry
I will stop hiding in a burned down home
I will stop carving hearts into the charred bed frame
I will stop falling on all of the shattered support beams jutting out of your ribs
I will stop putting up stick on stars onto your empty black ceiling
I am done trying to paint constellations into your black hole eyes
my dear I love you like a martyr loves their bible
but you starved me of light
My constellation girl was just a supernova
beautiful and dripping with death

When the ivory's just worn bones
all the kings broken thrones
pride and proper
turning down gold for copper
death of glory
death of tradition
death of wealth
death of health
When maskless faces
are lost in familiar places
the royalty complex
that you are special and understanding
you stand on gods landing
speak with angels then
there's reality
all angles not angles
the crazy ones
talking to 90 degree
corners
like a child on punishment
sent to sulk
at breaking her moms ivory seat.

there is so much midnight about her
It coils into her hair
Into her ivory smile
I could look at the sky and back into her eyes and not know the difference
she is five am in a saturday that you arch closer to; roll over just to look at because you like the view
she is the space between winter and fall when the leaves are confused as to who they are
wrapped up in violent reds and proud golds
hovering on the branches forcing the world to
freeze
demand a moment to look at how vibrant they are
she is the pause
She is holding my breath listening for her heart beat like a baseline
she is making a garden out of me
lilies blooming in my chest
in a field of I dont know what to do about the gardener taking residence in my heart
or what to do about the barbed wire roses she gives her and how foolishly she takes them
she is consumed with a dollar store bouquet of “I love you”
trying to wrap sunrise around a dark road with far too many houses and too few homes
why wont she come home?
I would plant lilies across her collarbone instead of iron roses
we’d sit on the floor and I’d teach her how to write I love you again
without the comma
without the but
or relash conversations and expectation
or maybe how to write how beautiful she is
rewrite all of the stars back into her midnight eyes.

We were like a house hollowed out by flames
Lust burning though the pretty paint over our bones
The fire from your harsh words curled around my heart, licking at the bottom of my spine
Carving I love you into the walls with ashes
Soft words that hit like death
Like decaying snowflakes
They blew through the home we had built together
Dancing with the floorboards just how our shoes used to
Waltzing up the steps Enameled in black war paint
From the epic of our love that raged within the walls
Support beams jutting out of the ground like fallen soldiers in the wake of our crusade
Memories strewn across the battlefield
Left floating in the eternal winter of ashes that our passion had left for us
I was ice trying to freeze over the fuze already lit for the end
You were like a burning match
lashing me to your cruel hand
getting pulled six feet under the rising water in our house
I was the flood
And you were the house fire
We were consuming each other in our own storms
You were burning up every piece of me trying to find fuel for your own destruction
I was too busy tripping over the fallen debris you left to run
the flood ripping every breathe out of your chest
the flood ripping out every memory from your dreams
because that is the only place we have left
I can only paint your face in my sleep
I didn't know until you how cold fire could be
You left me in a permanent coma of your shadow
I sleep walk through the streets at five am
trying to find the light in the distance
trying to find your face
but even in the dead of the night in two separate beds
we are a natural disaster chained in a house
weak ivory walls trying to contain
an arsonist
and an empty river

I feel  like dying
infinity
I feel like turning off the lights
and never turning them back on
I want to sink into the black
Into the nothing
I want to crawl around the stars and lay in the sky
I want to die like a super nova
shatter with every colour god has ever created
Paint it across all of the midnight I am living in
I am dying from walking in her midnight sky
Three am is only so fun for the first week
but day after day of 4 am constellation girl was killing me when I had to wake up in the morning
I was being consumed with shadows
That is all that is left of us
I am a shadow with too much blood
Too much human to pretend i am nothing
Her chest became the new house for my heart
but see
a house and a home are not the same thing
My I love yous were there
walking the hallways
but they were unwelcomed
they just ricocheted off of the walls like stray bullets
Like strangers in a home that they didn't belong in
I am sorry
I am sorry that I am a stranger
That I can only seem to write poems for you
I dont know what happened to my voice
Maybe I thought my words were softer when they weren't spoken
I was just trying to make the depression seem pretty
make the ribs that were bursting through my heart look less like knives pointed at you
baby
I promise they were put there by someone else
but I can't seem to be able to pull them out without dying again and again
I am trying so hard to make my pain look beautiful
even though it is not
It is ugly and covered in blood
It is a graveyard of smiles
It is drowning me
but instead I write about watercolour roses or some ****
because darling
I know you are afraid of the ocean
I am too
but maybe
just maybe If I can paint my heart ache a different colour you won't be scared of me
of this broken home of a body
I have white washed all of the walls for you
erased all of the burn marks and flood lines
I have rebuilt who i am hoping you could remind me who i was
But I forgot
I forgot you always said you wanted to travel
Im sorry I forgot you are temporary
I am just an empty repair shop with a permanent foundation
all I do is echo
echo the memory of fixing things
I just couldn't fix myself

Its eleven pm and I dont know where I am going as I pull my feet onto the train platform. My shoulders bumping with a stranger standing inside, even though there is only three of us on this train and enough distance between us to fit a car. I politely apologize and slump into a seat. I dont say, lm sorry, I was busy trying to breathe water,or im sorry my heart sounded like a grenade going off in a home; windows shattering, framework cracking, people choking and crying through the smoke, I am sorry my heart was too loud to hear you say excuse me. I watch the girl go and sit in a seat strategically placed in equal distance away from me and the other disheveled young man crying to himself with music blaring loud enough to compete with the war in my chest. I try to ignore the way she pushes her hair back just like you used to, or the way only half of her lip curls up as she smiles at her phone. I dont want to remember your smile, or think about who is putting it on your face. I rotate in the ***** and cut up bench laying my head against the double thick window. My forehead vibrating off of the glass, angrily ricocheting when the train hits a bump, bouncing off of the window and colliding back against the plexiglass. I dont do anything to stop it. I just sit and stare at nothing, trying to erase every inch of you from my mind, letting my head continue to bounce on the window, desperately trying not to pretend that it is morse code from you. I am trying to stop weaving you into every **** thing. Its really ******* hard. Especially when all I can seem to do right now is paint your face into the blank space. It feels like I am drowning, instead of breathing all I do is choke on the tears that are issued with every old memory. I am suffocating in my own ocean. And then in a second, everything is one eightied and I am on fire, scribbling ash over the picture of you I had carved into the seat. Every piece of me, wanting to burn down every piece of you. Its like each train stop is a new emotion. Everytime my head smacks into the window is a new flood of memories and new kaleidoscope of feelings that I dont want to deal with. Its like I am hitting a light switch, except every time I turn the lights back on its a different room.; but each time the florescent lights kick on there is more burn marks on the walls and the flood lines are higher. I am still dying, just in a new location. I am locked in a room no one can see, laying in six feet of water, waiting for the space between the ceiling and my lungs to collapse. The girl ten seats down cant see your hands pressed around my throat, or the inch gap I have remaining before I am left with nothing to breathe. I think the boy can though. We lock eyes and he rubs his face like he is scrubbing bleach acrossed a ***** floor, like he is trying to burn off his features, pulling the memory of his face out of my mind before it even has the option of staying. He looks at me, eyes pleading, “forget me, please dear God forget that I exist” He is begging me to ignore him so that he can continue to pretend he is a ghost. It’s okay boy with the see through eyes, the girl desperately trying to exclude us from her reality is the only one living on this train. I can tell your heart stopped beating just like mine did. I can see all of the broken support beams of the house you just left jutting out of your chest. I am so sorry. I am so so sorry that you were given a hand grenade instead of a lover. I can see that the water is up to your neck in your prison cell. So. I will give you everything that I have left. Every bit of oxygen that I have remaining so that you may walk off of this train with a pulse and colour in your cheeks. So that you can walk off alive with the girl humming softly to her music seated between us. I love you. You will make it. It will be okay You will do what I can not; learn to walk away.