my mother always said
"don't fall in love with a poet"
they pretend to love you
but what they really love
is writing about loving you
you are mere words to them
feelings cheapened by a page,
dusty grey typewriters,
and many unfinished drafts
of lovers both old and new,
you are the question mark,
but not the answer,
they are searching for ?
person unidentified: mystery
the page wanderer,
each poem a missing
person poster to cover their
bedroom walls.
they cannot love something
that is in their head
poets are the loneliest of
all people, my mother said.
they write to immortalize
what has long passed.
to live within their words,
but not reality,
lost souls writing suicide notes
and proclaiming it art.

Maybe I'm simply meant to adore you from afar, or to come up close but never quite touch you.

Much like the multitude of things you create, only for me to appreciate but never to keep.

Inside me is a hunger
Craving for your affection

step one.
you close your eyes.
you close them tight.
then you press your palms
against your
closed eyelids,
until
you start seeing red spots that remind you
of a song you wrote
for someone so long ago.
that someone doesn't matter anymore,
not really, so eventually,
neither will he.

step two.
you wear a nightgown.
the one with the lacy v neck, the one
that exposes your thighs,
the one with the vintage roses.
you wear it to bed to remind yourself
that you don't have to wear his attention
like a perfume
to feel ****.

step three.
you listen to those songs.
you know which ones.
you listen to them and sing or rap along
until your throat is sore, until
your chest hurts. do it
until you don't know why you're crying,
then write a song about why
you are crying,
so that when you look back,
you can see that it doesn't matter.
heartache fades.

step four.**
dive into a body of water in only
your under garments.
force yourself
to swim,
no matter how much
you want
to drown.

"I can’t stop crying because I know you’re gone. 
My friends tell me you never really loved me, because if someone loved another, they’d never leave them. Especially not in the darkest of times. 
I know you’re gone and I should be over it.
I know you’re gone, and crying isn’t going to bring you back. I know you’re gone, and no amount of poetry I write will result in you calling me up at 4 am. You don’t want me anymore, and I realized that the second you quit your good morning and goodnight texts. I watched you unlove me when our love spun out of control, and hit rock bottom. The funny thing is, I only loved you more from that moment on. But I know, I know. I know I’m never going to hear you sing to me again. I know you won’t pick up my calls at the first ring like you used to, because lately I’m just forwarded to voicemails. I get it. What we had was up and down, and I can’t expect you to love me forever.
Even though you told me you wouldn’t mind doing that. You told me you wanted to get as close as possible to forever with me.
I know you’re gone. But when will my heart finally understand what my brain already does?
I wish I could forget, and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I’m meeting new people, but somehow only the sound of your voice still echoes in my mind."

you said you would protect me but
instead you were the one who broke me

You knocked
and I opened so quickly
it was almost as if I were expecting you

You smiled
and it was the only time
I could control my mind whilst losing it

You kissed
and blank was the world
of past and future (it was only you and now)

You left
and what could I do but write
this poem about so little happiness in

man’s life

I can't write poetry anymore, I just can't
When you told me you were sick of me
Sick of love, sick of everything.
Our past. Our future. Sick of it all.

So this is how you left me.
We could have
talked. You could have told me I stepped
over the line. I could have changed.

Instead of fixing we are too used to
calling it quits.
We'd rather watch ourselves burn than
to change and compromise.

I wrapped myself up in my insecurities
Forged a knife out of it
stabbed in your  heart.
I was too caught up in my own
illusion of fun to notice you were gone

You were too used to being on top to
allow a wild animal challenge you up
You wouldn't allow your ego to bend
down to your heart

We loved like it's forever, if forever meant
59 days, countless kisses, and two broken
hearts