You kiss me and I
Feel you running through my bones like
The chill you get during a summer storm
When you're standing on the porch watching the lightning and
the Pouring
Rain and
The air is warm but the cold mist
Brushes across your skin.
Every hair on my body and even my *******
React.

I am not emotionally grounded
And no part of you is "safe" for me.

Yours is the only voice
That can change my heart to match its rhythm.
The only voice in which I lose the words
Focusing on the way you say them.
I think you reading a grocery list
Would still somehow give me butterflies
And turn me on.

Sometimes I feel like my heart
Beats in another person's chest.
Like I bleed
From someone else's wounds.

I wanted you to say you were on your way.
I wanted you to say you were coming.
I wanted you to say you didn't have to be my ex anymore
Not just my friend.
I wanted to see if we'd changed.
But I was afraid of messing it up again
Afraid that if we repeated the cycle
Next time we wouldn't have survived.
I wanted everything and nothing because
Even in its nonsense
Where we're at now
Is what makes the most sense.

They said the hunger would fade.
How laughable.

Before....I couldn't afford to like you because
Part of me seemed to know
That liking you would mean giving you my everything
And I didn't have enough of me
To sustain us both.

I want to kiss you when you're smiling.
It seems like you hold the happiness of the universe
In the lines at the corners of your lips
And if I kiss you maybe I'll get a taste.
So far it seems
That it's been working

Once
When I was a kid
My dad and I were walking and
We turned down a street that had the setting sun
Directly in my eyes.
I asked my dad to curse it.
He told me
We can't do that, for
Without the sun
We'd cease to exist.

Now
I sometimes find myself wishing to curse you
And I find myself
Unable to do so.

If I'd never had you
I don't know who I'd be.

You say you want to know me
What happens when you find out who I am?

There are so many things about us
To be afraid of
But when I look at you
All I notice
Is that our eyes
Make love.

Our eyes make love when they meet
And you never look away

Sometimes you fall for the wrong person
At the wrong time
In the wrong place.
Sometimes it's an infatuation and so
It doesn't really matter.
But sometimes those people
At those times
In those places
Are the ones that save you from yourself,
And that's why they're so important.

While I do not know how to live without loving you
I've learned to live without that kind of love.

You ask me
"What does it feel like
To sit around waiting for the person who you know is going to hurt you
To go ahead and get on with it?"

Have you ever tried to pretend your heart
Is a pebble at the bottom of a fast flowing river,
Cold?
Have you ever imagined it as the backside of the mirror
Where you stare yourself in the eyes
Trying to talk yourself back up,
Hard
Reflective
Insincere?
Have you ever thought what it would be like
To be the darkest part of the mountainscape
In that painting in your living room
Where you sit on your couch
Taking breaths,
Distant
But so so here.
And real.
And aching.
And bleeding.
Have you ever tried to control the cosmos?

You’re still here.
Every day, you’re still here.
I broke up with you but apparently that changes nothing now.

Some days you make me so mad I have to leave the room
And some days I leave the room because
All I want to do
Is kiss you

When will this stupid feeling go away.
Can I ever stop loving you?
This isn’t fair.
To either of us.
And now she’s involved.
Someone else is falling in love with me,
Hoping that she can trust that I’ve fallen out of love
With you
And here I am
Stuck in the middle
Still with no idea
Of what I want

And you’re still here.
In this heart that insists
On still beating.

Why is it so hard
Not to love you?

I've always said you were my sun
And I stand by that,
Ves como nada puede tocar el sol?
So I always wondered how I,
Your lowly earth,
Could have done so much damage.
And that's when I realized
I'm not earth.
I never have been.
My soul has always been a fire's greatest enemy
Fluid.
Capable of drenching you to the bone.
I don't know how I missed it
You can even see it in my eyes
My soul flows like the blood in my veins
Like rivers through the country side
Like the water from the firefighters' hose.

Always moving
Always adapting
Slowly changing those things with which it has
The most contact.

You have never been a rebound.
You've always been the original.
Everyone else is an 'after.'

You kissed me and
We departed and
I walked around seeing nothing.
They tell me it was a beautiful day
But my mind's eye is elsewhere
Nothing has changed.
Nine months later and I'm still
Addicted to your lips.

Time apart creeps
Like a candle slowly burning
But the thought of next year coming
Makes my chest ache with an emptiness
That knows not even cobwebs

When I called my mom that night
Trying to decide if I wanted to spend forever
With
Or without you
I asked her
"Will I ever find someone who loves me the way she does?"
And she told me
"Maybe. Maybe not."
I made the greatest gamble that I've ever seen in my short life,
I put all my chips on another instead.
And for so long....
I won.
For so long, I was the champion.
The high roller.
The big bucks
We were the fire that kept the whole casino alight.

We've been put out now for longer than we officially burned
And I've come to accept that.
I've grown to love myself as myself
Without her by my side
But sometimes I still miss that heat.
And having felt it so hot
For so long,
Having had something
So uniquely us,
Now I wonder for real
If I'll ever have something that can compare.
I'm unsure if I will
But then,
The gambler's role is to take chances.

Her gaze naturally shifts to the clear blue skies.
Is that how her eyes found mine?

There is black and white,
And then there is you.

If I sleep until I die
Maybe I'll wake up into a happier time

I gave myself completely to someone
Once.
She saw my soul and she knew who I was.
And she left
From irrevocable and unintentional
Pain.

I have spent the time since then
Not only trying to remember who I am
But also trying to figure out what love is
If not just a tool
To hurt each other.

Your touch not only takes my breath away,
But also gives it back.
In and out
A necessary cycle
I didn’t know the world could be so
Still.
Every moment,
Our faces close enough for two to become one
I can barely see you but

I don’t need to.

I can feel you.

I can feel us.

I can sense us,
The energy is palpable.
Our auras vibrating so intensely,
They’re almost solid.
I feel solid when I’m with you.
You hold my hand and I swear I wouldn’t notice if the world crashed and burned,
Because you kiss me and
It’s already gone.
I’ve always wanted to walk on the moon.
Who knew all I had to do
Was start dating you.

It's excruciatingly hard to tell
If I smile less now because
I'm always focused on trying to
Understand this new language,
Your language,
And this is my concentration face,
The face you used to love,
Or if I smile less now
Because learning this language
Your language,
Reminds me constantly
That I no longer have you.

They say you shouldn't look directly at the sun
But how can I resist
Focusing on you

I want to write you and say
That I've never stopped loving you.
I want to write you and demand that you see me so that
I can see that
The love I have for you now is stuck.
Is the love that I had for you
The last time I saw you
The last time you saw me
The last time we kissed.
I want this to be over.
I want to know that I can stop writing
About how I can't let this idea go.
The ship has sunk and
Part of me watched it go from the safety of shore but
Part of me is still inside of it
Sitting
Comfortably, albiet a little fidgety,
Listening to the clock tick tocking away my years,
My loves,
My partners,
Envisioning that one day you'll come scuba diving down
Down
Down
To find me here, where we both know I've been
Waiting.

I want to write you and say
That I've never stopped loving you.
Maybe putting the message in a bottle
Releasing it into the water that surrounds me
And watching where it floats to
Will set me free from this sunken ship too.

I'm so done
I say as I continue
Thinking about her weekly
Daily
Hourly.
Thinking of gifts to buy her during my travels
Looking through pictures.
I secretly love the pain that shoots through me with every
Swipe of the finger.
I think I deserve it.

You took away my fear of attachment.
And then you gave it back.

She doesn't inspire poetry.
She demands song instead,
The way a breeze calls forth a melody
From a glass bottle's rounded lip.

When you kiss me
I don't need to see the stars.
I feel them
In every nerve ending.
Supernovas imploding at each cell touching you.
Weightless as we
Drift through cosmic stardust.

With you I'm an astronaut.
I'm a deep sea explorer
A sky diver
A bungee jumper.
With you
I'm weightless
Fearless
Endless.
With you
I am everything I wanted to be
And more.
With you my eyes see things they never saw before
My heart feels things it didn't think existed
My brain cannot keep up.
I wish I could express my love
As lucidly as I feel it.

Many years ago you called me ephemeral.
To this day I don't know if it was a compliment.

I had someone once.
Someone I'd give up dreams for.
Someone I'd think about kids for.
Someone for whom I'd change my forever.
I do not have her anymore
But now
In this fear that my forever
May be drastically changed
From some other power's volition.
In this terror that my body and my brain
May have turned against me.
In this land of unknowns
Of maybes
Of "we'll have to see"s
She is still the one I want to tell.
And the one who might not even care.

How could you tell me I'll always be your
One who got away
When I was sitting here
Wanting you?

"x" is just a broken "l"
Split down the middle
And hanging on by a thread.

The feelings I had with you
Are tattooed into me far
Deeper
Than the ink on my skin
Can ever go.

I could write you
Five hundred poems
To explain to you what changed in me.
But that would require
Me
To understand
Myself

How do I explain to you
Why I think I love you more
When it's a conglomeration of the little things

Like the fact that I finally feel good enough
Like I don't need to change.

The fact that whether I like it or not,
My plans have started shifting.

I've never been so scared of feelings.
Never been so unsure of the future,
Watching it approach faster than it ever has before
All the while holding your hand
And thus feeling secure.

I really don't want to compare you to her
And really, you make it easy for me not to.
Because this is so different than the last time.

I'm afraid of how easy this is
And how well we align.
If we don't have to fight for it,
Is it even real?

When your brain knows an edge isn't safe
How do you tell your heart to back away?

Every story you live
Is your story.
Every story you live
Doesn't have to be
Epic
To be told.

This friendship used to be a picture perfect sunrise
But over time it has faded
And oversaturated,
And we've become blinded.
The sunrise is over,
Now time to wait for the sun to set.

Five years long our story stretches
Each one a different tale
And seeing you fills me with ghosts.

I miss the times
When we had time.

And then she's back
And she's there and it's normal and you're
Talking and you can breathe again and
The world has colour again and
Music makes sense again and then
You have to remind yourself that
It's not.
There's nothing normal about this and
She isn't yours
Anymore.

When the one you know
You will always love becomes
The only one who will
Use everything she knows about you
To hurt you
Time and time again
What do you do?

Three years later
I finally answered the phone.
The still recognizable voice of the 14.5 cigarettes a day that she's become said
"I'm sorry."
Nothing else.
We sat on the line in silence
For a time.
It was all I'd been wanting.

Some people drink
To numb.
I drink
To let myself feel.

We all had to be a little selfish.
Is it our fault that
It was the end of Us?

It's sad that
These days it seems no one can hear
Past the screaming inside their own
Head.

I don't know how to forget to
Look at your
Horoscope.

Does she make you happy?
Can she make you laugh?
Was it that easy to forget?

Does she treat you like a queen?
Does she kiss you when you smile?
Was I that easy to forget?

In the midst of the broken promises
And the forgotten agreements
I guess I just want to know,
Are you happy with her?