Suddenly, the world went numb. All the pain, the worry, the apathy, the carefulness; it all went away. There was no sound, no hum, no white noise. The light stopped flickering; the curtains stopped dancing with the breeze blowing through the window. All I felt were your hands.
Slowly and softly making their way down my shoulders, tracing my skin like fingers exploiting a map. Gently feeling the goose-bumps form along the surface of my arms, and gently intertwining your fingers with mine.
I could have closed my eyes. I could have convinced myself that your love for me ran deeper than this. The truth is, this was the foreplay before the passionate goodbye. This was you staining your pigment onto my skin.

“Stop. This can’t be your goodbye. You can’t leave me like this”

You stopped. You looked into my eyes; the same eyes I looked into so many times before. As though you had it all planned out, you brushed my shoulders with your lips and whispered in a way that still forms goose bumps along my thighs;

“I have been looking for ways to show you I love you.
Now all I can do is leave”

My thighs frame your cheeks,
Tambourine tantrum in the sheets.

it’s interesting to think about all the right people who might’ve come into your life at the wrong time.
but then again,
i often wonder if time could’ve saved or wrecked us at all.
maybe from the start, we were destined to be nothing more than strangers.
even if i had been weighed down, glued to one spot,
nomadic tensions silenced,
it seems likely that, still, our friendly smiles and cordial jokes would’ve been
limited, somehow,
by unseen barriers,
by the cruel overseer that is fate.

i think i meant something to you, once.
not a lot, but something.
and now,
now i’m just there.
a solid. something that takes up space.
you still sit close to me,
but not as close as you did when we first met.

and i wonder, sometimes, if i did something wrong,
if there was something i could’ve done, or not done, to change things,
to make things better,
to stop us from drifting silently onto the end of the growing list of tragedies my life’s friendships have been.

but maybe there was nothing i could do.
that thought, while terrifying, is perhaps the most comforting one.
after all, it is better to be left helpless from the start than to be burdened with the knowledge that the stones you threw became part of the landslide.

i hope, maybe, that we can salvage what’s left,
perhaps even grow it into something better.
but somewhere inside, i know that’s fool’s talk.
i doubt i ever meant much to you, anyway.
i always was, and always will be, just another shadow,
another stranger,
another change of season.
i suppose i was your winter —
a barrage of snow and ice that danced in clumsily,
not bothering to think about what would happen once spring came.

i hope you’ll remember me when i’m gone.
even now, it’s nice to think that i cross your mind as much as you cross mine.
but my hopes seldom match my reality.

so, still, i am just another.
watching.
waiting.
being.
i am nothing, and in being nothing i suppose that i, too, am everything.

but i will never be your everything.

and i could say that i regret that,
but perhaps i’m still holding onto that last bit of hope.

always the optimist,
and yet even more so the pessimist.

i thought you might be both, too.
i thought we might find a way to complete one another,
much like how the land completes the sea.

but i suppose i am left the earth without its ocean,
the ground without its rain.

it’s a horrible thing, detachment.
my roots never quite find what they’re looking for in the soil.

i had just hoped you would be different.

(a.m.)

"...But truthfully I'd rather stare at your hands. I enjoy how they never shake the way mine do as though I've been carrying an object as heavy as my heart for too long; but they're always empty. I enjoy the way you wrap them around pencils, and coffee cups with a tight grip. I like the way you make it seem like you don't let go very easily. I used to rest in weak hands. I used to slip through the fingers of people who shook me off while I held on as though my life depended on them. I think the problem with the way I live is that I often never give myself the satisfaction of controlling whats mine. I'm not strong enough to make anyone stay. I'm not good enough for them to ever want to. I've lived with this reality making home in my mind but there's something about the way you looked at me this morning; kind of the way an artist looks at a finished canvas in total awe. Maybe that was the moment that I realized that I should probably stop staring at your hands and make love to your eyes. The way the light up as though you've been swallowing lightning bugs. The way you never hesitate to let them linger. The way their blue reminds me of the walls of my grandmas house that was built up with hands that look just like yours. I like the way you stare even when your blood isn't laced with alcohol. Almost as though I'm the painting that no matter how long you look at it; it still remains beautiful. The truth is, my walls are covered in love letters and poems written for someone I never knew... that was until I met you."

She's like deliquescent caramel,

the cool side of a pillow

        to lay your weary head,

subtleties of springtime &

          warmth in wintertide,

whispering hope upon lush  

        Zephyrus pipe dreams,  

    mellifluous nymph with wings

                 of a butterfly warrior,

softly determined,

    unfailingly true-hearted,

       whilst relentlessly ferocious

  Wise, yet sometimes struts

        blindly in the light,

       as dulcet tones of a cello's

           melodious marmalade

            in sentiment's tender fancy,

she's beauty, charm,

         knowledge, poetry,

               utter strength,

               & humane weaknesses,

she's twisted and ethereal,

           her aura sublimely captivating

     you may covet her body,

            you'll never possess her soul

how deranged , can
I do letters , arrange
verbs
displayed black on white
noun verbally
portray points
of my brain taking in
electrical impulse
pulses painting reality,
neurologically composed symphonies
I give in to it.

It has started
occurring to me
that I rely
too much on my
muses
to give me worth.

We are
too young
and I am
too small
to start giving
bits of myself away
to be stretched and
expanded upon
by others.

I cannot
be restricted
to dependency
or limit myself
to the dead-end
streets
paved by
people with names
I forgot.

I can walk
in whichever direction
I choose
and write words
that I will not
dedicate
to you.

when I read Emerson
just the same
as when hearing
Led Zeppelin
or watching
Breakfast at Tiffany's
just a bit of breathlessness,
a spasm of
echoes ringing bells
Cat,
reflecting back,
in my gasps,
about to burst into tears,
touch,
deeply,
I don't understand it.
It,
is in me,
just driving, on on, endlessly,
the motif, the Theme,
rhythm.

I wrestled with the black sea
that brood inside of her,
but nothing I possessed
could stop that dark tide
from taking her.

I know darling, I gave you an ocean of words
when all you needed were a few drops of rain.

In all honesty I've never been good with words. I never knew what to respond after the doctor would ask me what hurt, or what to tell my mother after I saw her cry when my dad left. Poetry is placing words in all the wrong places in order to build something right. Poetry is taking apart the puzzle and forcing the pieces into spaces they don't fit. I tried to write you a letter to tell you that I miss you, the problem with poetry is that there's no metaphor that makes this emptiness inside my chest any more beautiful. There's no personification real enough to make my sheets feel like you're laying in them. There's no simile literal enough to make my heart feel as though its healing. I wish I could place these words on my tongue and roll them out for you to hear, but since I've last kissed you I can't even find the motivation to part my lips. I always find myself questioning why I keep writing; because the problem with my poems is that you're never the one reading them.