I let Cupid carelessly aim an arrow at an apple on my head.
I never thought about how all of the targets he hit may have been accidents.
About what it would be like to pull the arrow out of my chest.
I couldn't stop the bleeding
and he didn't know how to patch it.
I realized then the dangers of putting your heart in the center of a crossfire
hoping,
hoping
the child with the arrow would spare it.

I loved you so much my heartbeat shook the heavens,
how dare you tell me I didn't love you hard enough?
This was supposed to be that soft love.
The kind that caresses your face like a light breeze.
It was enough to shake your soul
like it was rocking you to sleep.
I wanted it to soothe you
and leave you breathless
all in the same moment.
I wanted it to be as fierce as an earthquake
that shifts all of the plate tectonics back into place
as if it were fixing a puzzle.
I wanted it to be as loud as a pin drop
in a dead silent room.
I wanted silence with you.
I wanted the screams to echo through your mind
like I was standing in the middle of
mountains and valleys
yelling to God all of the love stories
I wrote about you.
I wanted you to listen with your eyes closed
and your mouth open.
I wanted to feed you gentleness on a silver spoon.
I wanted to love you.
I wanted to be enough.
But your eyes were always as big as flying saucers,
and your heart only ever the size of a needle hole.
My love was never meant for you.

I am certain I fall in love just to watch them leave.
What better way to fill a hole than through writing?
I was never much of a gardener,
everything I watered died right before my eyes.
But I learned that if I planted a seed
right in the void in the center of my chest
and watered it daily with soft love and strong words,
I could grow something bigger than he ever was to me.
This is for the ones you have to make into poetry
because it's the only part of them that stays.

This is what it feels like.

Scorching summer day, windows down, music blasting.
You never wore your seatbelt,
Hair always whipped around in the wind,
Teeth always reflecting off the hot summer sun.
You were always wild.
Never following rules,
Always bending them,
Always till they broke.

I admired that about you, I could never be like that.

This is what it feels like.

Fast cars in cool summer nights.
Breeze caressing our faces like a
Lost lover coming back after a long winter.

This is what it feels like.

Tires gliding on pavement.
Feeling joy kissed
And eager to be young.

This is what it feels like.

Bright lights flashing,
Horns blaring,
Tire skids.
A pain so sharp and swift like the crack of a whip.
Glass popping,
Seatbelt burns.

Black.

This is what it feels like.

"Accident on highway 610."
Static.
"One casualty. Female."

Static.

This is what it feels like.

"We are gathered here today to celebrate the life of..."

This is what it feels like.

Mourning love and loss.

This is what it feels like.

I know heaven would treat her well.
I can only imagine it smells like lavender and
The lights are so bright,
Yet  so soft it makes you feel like
You're in a dream world.

I miss you.

But I know sometimes when it rains and the
Clouds part open in the most curious of ways
When the sun shines through the breaks,
It's you telling me you're alright.

I know now there's no fear of bright headlights,
Only a captivating eternal glow
Captured in the lens of forever.

And I imagine when the rain is warm and rolls off of my arms

That if you touched me,

This is what it'd feel like.

Love is a fickle word.
I learned in anatomy today that the heart
isn't shaped anywhere near the way
we thought it was when we were kids.
And I've spent years trying to put bandages
on a wound that couldn't be healed
by short term romance and desperate company.
It turns out loneliness isn't an easy hole to fill.
But I still throw piles of words,
one on top of the other,
into the void;
hoping to make a poem that will take up the space.
I wonder how many times
someone can wake up beside you
and forget you're there
before you start to wonder when it was that you went missing.
Since when is it called letting go
if they were never holding on to begin with?
Here's where all the lost loves go--
hopefully they find home in one another.
                                   •••
This is for the ones you have to make into poems
because it's the only part of them that stays.

Your love was like the Barnum Effect
and though I thought you fit me
like a glove,
I learned you'd been worn
by thousands of other lovers
who'd thought the same exact thing.

When you think about someone so much,
your dreams start to smell like them.
And you have to wash your linens
because your sheets started to smell like them.
Had to get a grip because when you breathed,
it still smelled like them.
What I'm saying is:
love isn't love when you're without them.

Poetry is not synonymous for love.
Poetry is not synonymous for pain.
But I can make its words into an adjective
and use it to describe the tightening in my chest when I look at you
or the tightening in my chest
when you look the other way.

I thought I could drink poetry until the words started to curdle in my mouth

Its 1:28am and I can't sleep.
Instead of seeing films of technicolor
on the backs of my eyelids,
I'm wondering whether your lips
taste like strawberries or vinegar.
Its amazing how heavy
a chest can feel just fondling
the idea of drowning in you;
and i think about the time you
accidentally called me an angel.

Now its 1:32 and I'm wondering
if an angel falls for you,
does that mean she's plummeting to hell?

Poetry is meant to display something magnificent,
but the only thing magnificent about this
is the tragedy.
(I don't want to write because there is nothing beautiful about this.)
And all I can think about
is how much of a sin it must be
to think about you,
instead of the boy who has built himself
around me like a cathedral.
About how it's dark outside,
but how this longing for you is darker.
About how I only write about boys
I could see myself loving.
And wonder why my thoughts
are dancing around Lucifer
instead of Saint Michael.

Is it possible to fall in love with just someone's hands?
I hate to objectify a living being,
but his hands feel like home.
And I know it's not usual to compare someone to a house,
but they say home is where the heart is
and my heart has never been so settled.
It's probably wrong to be in love with a person's features
but not the actual person;
to move into their vacancy space and
make a home out of them
because, in return, they will fall in love with you
and you will not be able to reciporicate it.
After all, people do not fall in love with objects,
and when they do, it's possessive.
But I have always been selfish and this time is
no different.

Winter at night is like the sun
has been lost from the sky,
but still seems to light up the heavens.
And the moon is missing,
but you can still find your way
to your darling’s bed.
But I like to think               ✺
that the sun               ❋              ✲
and the moon                  ❉
are lost lovers                          
and winter is the only time
they can escape long enough to
steal a kiss from one another         ✺
in some far away galaxy that
no one knows.                            ❊
And without the moon          ❋
to hold control,
the waves go crazy
kissing the shores
aggressively and relentlessly.
And everyone is in love.

If you asked me to tell
where the ceiling ends and
the walls begin,
I wouldn’t be able to tell you.
When I think about you
everything blurs into black
like an unkindness of ravens.
And I—
You are
the only thing that ever
crosses my mind as soon as
dusk turns into night,
and I could never tell you why.
I like to think that
just as birds know when to fly
and time knows when to die,
I was meant to love you.

How do you stop writing about pain
and start writing about softness?
How do I stop talking about the way it hurt
when you hugged me so loosely?
Like if that's how you gripped me when my life depended on it, I'd go tumbling down?
How do I stop writing about emptiness?
About how, though there are millions of
stars in the sky, there are gaps in-between
all of them and sometimes the blackness
swallows me?
How do I start writing about how
comforted the sun makes me feel when it
wraps it's warm rays around my wrist
on days I hang my arm out the driver's
window?
How do I start writing about how big the
world is?
About how, if I wanted, I could pick up and move to anywhere on Earth?
About how colorful the world is?
From indigo skies
to infinite pallets of quizzical colors
that boggle my mind and keep me in
wonder?
About the greens of rainforests, and reds of
dirt, and oranges of canyons, and yellows
of light, and blues of seas, and purples of
mystery,
and how when you combine all of those colors, it paints hope in the blackness that
lingers in dark corners of me?

I guess it starts here.

Isn't it weird how we see the image of stars that no longer exist when we look into the night sky? Sort of like looking into a mirror and seeing the reflection.

I dissected a heart today,

and it wasn't for science.

I shattered your being

and bathed in your silence.

Your innocent is what

became your downfall,

because you believed

innocence lied within all.

You found joy in the

love of twos,

but my joy came in

destroying you.

You find joy in love

and all its parts,

I find joy in bleeding hearts.

They say repetition makes you remember things easier.
I forget what his face looks like every now and again I forget what his face looks like every now and again I forget what his face looks like every now and again I forget--

They say if you say a word too many times,
it loses it's meaning.
I'msorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorry
sorrysorrysorryso­rrysorrysorrysorry.
Please staystaystaystaystaystaystaystay.

They say if you say something enough times...want it bad enough, it'll come true.
He'll come back to me, he'll come back to me, he'll come back to me.

They say that sometimes, if you love someone, it means you have to let them go.

But if I don't remember,

who will?

She sets fire to everything she touches,
I think as my mind burns.
I can't have anything, she takes it away.
Engulfs it. Entraps it.
Monopolizes it.
I can't have anything of my own.
I am sent spiraling into a retrograde.
Screaming at her to stop
as I try to grab the things out of my
burning house.
"DON'T TOUCH THIS, DON'T TOUCH THIS DON'T TOU--"
Everything she touches turns to ember.
She will ruin everything I love.
I just need to hold on to one thing.
Anything.
She sets fire to everything that is mine!*
My mind burns.
I scramble to save anything I can salvage
as the flames bellow in
and the smoke engulfs the room.
"COME BEFORE THE FIRE GETS TO YOU.
DON'T TOUCH IT, DONT TOUCH IT, DONT TOUCH--"
It's a race between me and the flames
as they dance around the floor, walls,
ceiling.
The room is swallowed in smoke,
and I stagger outside
coughing and swaying.
I can't salvage anything before the entire
house burns down.
I look,
disheartened at the place where
foundation used to be.
Nothing now but rubble and wispy smoke,
knowing this would happen from the beginning.
"Look what she did," I say as I clutch the lighter.

I remember when I looked
into your blue green eyes
and saw you staring into his:
sky blue.
I used to imagine us gazing at
the pale blue of the sky
as it turned from amber,
to orange,
to red,
to purple,
to black,
and then watching the stars together.
Counting out I love yous in the constellations.

Then I looked up and saw you;

And I realized the only sky you'd ever see
was trapped in his eyes.
(And ******* were they pretty.
But ******* did it hurt.)

You don't need ocean eyes
to drown someone.
When I looked at you
I wondered,
*Why drown in blue
when I can look into your
forest green eyes
And suffocate on branches
and leaves
as they sprout from my throat?

Love was a concept pressed
against the pocket of my mouth
like a tongue in my cheek,
and I kept it tucked away
between broken teeth
and cracked lips.
Love was a thing that always
kept me parched,
and though it sounded soft
coming out of his mouth,
when I bit down
it was as hard as stone.
We didn't know how to love.

I used to whisper stories to the asphalt,
wanting to be anywhere but the city
I lived in.
Passing overhead green signs became routine to me,
I saw them more than birds swooping across civilian streets.
I would drive until I felt at home--
no wonder I still feel unsettled.
I am a modern nomad.
A human vagabond.
As I drove,
counting time in white lines passing
and days in rearview mirror sunsets
I'd beg to the roads,
"Find a life for me, freeway."

We started this in summer

When it was warm and fresh and free,

And our skin shined gold

Because we are

The gems of our generation.

 

But you left.

 

And the seasons changed.

 

It is now winter, and my heart is freezing cold.

Our romance has turned into

Nothing more than a

Light snowfall:

Slow and steady,

But when it settles,

It leaves the ground heavy.

Hearts heavy.

And our kisses are like

The cold, bitter wind:

They can travel

The distance,

But when they reach you,

It’s no longer a gentle

Breeze to caress your face.

Rather a hard slap that brings

You to tears when it

Hits you head on.

 

And I’m hoping

 

Since the next season is spring,

That we can crush everything we were

Into the dirt.

Grind it with the heels of

Our sneakers

Until there is nothing.

Then we can use the tears

I’ll bring--

From realizing that I’d

Rather have an ocean between us

Than three measly states--

And maybe the showers

That spring will bring,

That the angels will cry for us

When they see

Their two broken soldiers

Walking away from

What they could've been,

To sprout our romance from the dirt

And pick up right where we

Left off

Just before summer starts again.

There are drafts that sweep through the gaps in your house, held up just like ribcages; but the difference between a house and a home is whether the heart lies in it.

I bet you the stars feel the same way you do: lost in the vast body of the universe.
I bet they feel small among all of their cosmic peers.
I bet they feel like there are thousands of stars just like them.
Yet we still lie down in the grass,
in the middle of the street,
on rooftops
to gawk at their beauty,
though they're light-years away.
To stare at how dazzling they look on black canvas.
Fall in love with the constellations.