Strong
Bold
Beautiful
Intelligent
Powerful
Kind
Wise
Our better half

But you're wrong, my dear
You're mistaken
It is not me
I told you before
I know how it is
Better than you could ever know
Because i've lived through it all
More than once, sweet girl
It hurts, and it won't stop
Maybe it didn't start with you
It's certainly not your fault
But when you turned me away,
In The Midst of the Stars,
Remember?
You had the chance there
To end the cycle
That my life continues to perform
In that moment,
I loved you and no one else
So you think it's worth it?
You think i'll prevail?
Perhaps you don't know me
And my world
As much as i thought

I want to eat your hair
until it pools thick in my gut,
barreling black through my intestines.
Inhale your elbows, shoulders
every movement, noise,
the face you makes when calculating a tip. Moments laughter
comes so hard your face doesn't make a sound at all

Smoke still lingers in grocery store parking lots,
your puffy eyes hunting caffeine in the noonday sun.
No more a blunder on your part.
Simply a life of difficult days.

Half memories lie within these things.
A little girl who spent summers indoors
, for reasons I don’t recall.
Where her parents were, God only knows.
Venturing out beyond the sunset to drop
bottled notes into puddles and storm drains.

Staring with an amplitude that is making your organs rattle against each other.
I can feel you going on with your day.
It's the salute that hurts, a handshake you don't want to return
graves you planted yourself.

pick the wrong adventure in a conversation,
words move outside of time, today and yesterday
nostalgic for moments still happening,
as if looking back on it from a great distance

The uneventfulness of true struggle is quietly grotesque.
Like the death of a dog I know I should have loved better,
forgetting to witness anything save for the aftermath.

You can’t make fire feel afraid.
We were younger, and we are, and we will be again.

Human beings are capable of connecting their mouths, taking in
one another’s breaths for up to seventeen minutes
before they lose consciousness from depleting all available oxygen,
filling their lungs with carbon dioxide.

Lately, days have been without sound.
If love isn’t permanent
neither is its absence.
Movement in either direction tastes haunted

I’d have loved you best in reverse.
Led the black tar from your lungs, climbed back up that waterline to massage
the hate from your kidney. Sewn your clothes back on and
glided through that abandoned doorway to a living room
chair that would forever stay white.

Language is a peculiar thing,
when I say the word “tomorrow”, I have always meant you.
A wrinkle slinking across the carpet
when I’m strung out on caffeine and hope,
kitchen knife dotted with who knows whose skins.

Love means something different when all you want
is a bed to die in
and enough change to love a cold plastic cup
dancing through tattooed fingers,
like stained glass in a war zone.

There will be times
you need to go across black waters
heal at your own pace. So I will build the most beautiful boats,
launch you from the docks myself. Strew campfires across the shoreline.
A reminder there will always be a boat
and land to return to.

I opened my mouth and it felt like my soul was speaking in vowels. And what came only ever sounded a little like Y-O-U.