I bite.
Not with teeth.
with silence,
with sharp glances,
with walls built higher than your reach.

I’m not cruel.
I’m just tired
of being kind first
and torn apart second.

You call it attitude.
I call it armor.
Because being soft
never saved me.
It only made the fall hurt more.

So I speak less now.
Agree less.
Trust less.
I pull away before someone has the chance
to walk out first.

It’s not that I don’t want love.
I’ve learned that even “I care about you”
can come with conditions.
Even soft hands
can leave bruises
you can’t see.

I bite
because once,
I didn’t.
And it nearly broke me.

Your absence hit
like a stem,
fresh-cut—
sap still weeping,
leaves still turning
toward a blue,
fictioned sun.

In Dublin in December I sat
on a shore bench in Sandymount

& watched thunderheads strut
on stork legs of raking rain while

bullish boats trundled through
with taut cheeks sobbed with rime.

My heart was full of weeks of doubt,
I'd flown in on a night plane

aching with the knowing
that something was badly turned,

distance could no longer be borne,
all the miles within and without.

We drank, coupled, and confessed
through long, long nights as outside

the high open window the stars
sloughed their waffling shine into

the many arms of the river, and gulls
eavesdropped on desperate sins.

By day she showed me her city
of castles and secret gardens,

elephant bones and electric trees,
& quietly urged me to join her.

As we crossed Beckett bridge
to seek troubled love on her couch

we pierced a cold and hanging fog,
prehaunted by the loss that followed.

I’m barely a poet,
yet you’re still my muse.
I say it doesn’t hurt-
that my purpose is views.
Steps I take forward
toward moving along
make you more distant,
and that feels ******* wrong.

I know that you know and
it could never be the same.
I just have to figure out
how to remove ache from your name.
The letters, they hurt
when they sit side by side-
and to hear them out loud?
A blast to my mind.

Because I like to spiral,
to wonder and dream.
I erased our messages-
yet here you come on my screen.
You can’t give me an inch-
I will dream a whole mile.
I’ve been that way always,
since I was a child:
hoping and loving
and dreaming for better.
I hate accepting reality-
and this ****** weather.

I can romanticize rain
and thunder and storms,
pretend they can heal me,
make me accept new norms.
But I miss my lover,
so quiet, so sweet,
and leaving that love
drowning feels like defeat.