I don't have to see you
to know who you are
to know that you're beautiful in every way
words achingly sweet, like sugar and sorrow.

We met at the bottom of the sea
in a mirage of fleeting words
as we both left for our separate islands
thoughts dripping like water droplets on the sand.

I never saw the way you frown
the way your eyes lit up when you smile
or the scratches on your wrists
to know that I can't survive without you.

Though you are out of reach
alone with your own love on your island
I cannot forget who you are
and the dulcet tastes of your syllables.

So, if I could, I would slip into the deep
for I would not need air
I would only need you, and your sweetness
and, if it is for not, let me drown.

Please, just let me drown.

I filled your veins with water and wrote you down on white paper so I didn't have to read you back anymore. Girl's got a suicide pact across the pacific and all I can do is taste the dust.
2. There is a certainty in the way your body moves out time with itself when you think too much.
3. You told me you wanted to be a saint but you were too afraid of the sight of god. When you asked what belief tasted of they told you: fresh buttercream and a wasp's sting. We didn't see you for days.
4. There is a certain tension and it only exists between the bends of girl's legs and the concrete which holds them stronger than any arms could.
5. I want to run every cliche by you and watch you hold hands into the night with it instead of me.
6. Some people can be replicated entirely out of candle wax.
7. WHY DO YOU HAVE TO BE SO ******* SELF AWARE ALL THE TIME. You can't even watch yourself.
8. You know you're a halfway house of cells and who are you to say I can't keep up?
9. Say would you tell me if I was just a little off key?
9. Would you tell me the answers to the questions I never asked?
9. Would you play that evening differently if you could turn back the hands that bind you?
10. I burnt you a bridge and sent you the fire like we could ever fill a room with your god. I want to ask him what he thinks of our sins.
11. There is a fluidity in the way your words turn back on themselves.
11. There is a fluidity in the way you turn back on yourself.
11. There is a fluidity in the way people leave doors open for you.
12. I don't think I'd even know what to say to you if I saw you.
13. I only feel comfortable on even numbers.
13. I guess I made myself an odd number.
13. I don't know what we're left with.
13. This is not how we were supposed to end up.
14. I wish you could see the holes you left in the back of my throat.
15. Loving you was as easy as leaving the lights on.
16. And that walk to your parents house was a floodlit symphony like you capitalised every word of every passage I wrote about you with
17 reasons to stay.
And 18 to leave.

The first was the last time I shook like a guard rail and you were a concrete staircase, and I swear, I ain't never seen nothing like you yet.
The second: my fist on your name. But I am here now, like a lit splint bursting into flames, you won't ever find a ghost like me again babe.
The third. And you just want to **** everything. I said you just want to **** everything in your Berlin Wall house.
Your girl's got a bullet hole for a mouth and when it rains, it really does pour round here.

I have spent a lot of time
gazing at you quietly
and enough time has passed
to where I have seen everything.

You sigh a little sometimes,
a little huff of soft air from the
corners of your mouth
when you think I'm not looking.

When you're nervous, you fidget
fingers curled up in blonde hair
canines nibbling on your cheek
when you think I won't notice.

You smile at the littlest things
you laugh enough to make me sigh
it's a little giggle of a laugh, and it's sweet
when you think I'm not paying attention.

But, I am, and have been since I saw you
my eyes have never since wandered
if it's those silences that make you doubt
leave them all behind.

For it is in those silences that I truly see
all of those tiny gestures and sounds
little sighs, giggles, widened eyes
that make me remember.

They make me remember that I,
the lonely soul, the aloof fool
fell in love with you easily
like those smiles, effortless and warm.

So, when you notice me watching
you needn't be shy anymore
because I have been watching you
since that day we met.

And my eyes will never stray. *I promise.

When I was five,

things went by fast

like the cursory glances I took

at the buildings and houses outside the window of an expeditious vehicle

And candles were left burning

in and out of the dark

When I was eleven,

things sped up a little more

and I was no longer looking at the world outside my window

but at the small droplets of water impatiently rolling down the sleek glass

And mirrors were objects that I held in my hand,
and stood in front of that contained another world – another me

Now that I’m marked with time

and the depth of the ocean is imprinted right across my heart,

my window is archaic and irrelevant, consumed in dust and moist

For my eyes do not see through them anymore

I am standing outside of it

And the candles are blown out

even in the dark confines of my bathroom

Because the mirrors are not another world, not another me

but a reminder of the battles I failed to overcome,

a reflection of a body that I must look away from,

a question that painfully burned itself into my mind

You had to be me
talking **** about Aristotle
then finding him in the poem on the next page.
We had been talking about how rhetoric makes students of analysis
feel like they live in some intelligent matrix.

You had to be me
to know that was very topical at that time in my life.
To know what wild bewilderment meant
at it’s actual size.
Two eyes, about the size of spare change, must of been going crazy,
but I couldn’t know unless I was you.

You had to be me
to feel as if you were enclosed in open space
feeling simultaneously,

empty objects come to life.
Tugging at the connections in mind
I was bound to make because of where
those same mechanical hands
had already fostered me.

Making me think something like god
could be construction lights over my exit sign
creating a tunnel out of the kind of darkness
night tells tired protagonists
exists to make you stronger.

You had to be me
to know that strength is a metric of preparedness,
and preparedness is a metric of memory.
I forgave mine.
I only know an instant,
the past shrinks under the weight of my experience
like a shivering body
under a bed sheet.

My strength dreams quiet fists and
sweats from voracious hips.
Unlike the stories,
the night has made me a tender man.
Unlike the stories,
that’s ok.
I’m dying just as fast as any hero with much more romance.