Let's go with two exclamation points

Rip the air from my lungs
Shriveled and lonely and pink inside
The flesh dancing the salsa for a breath

Atrophied arms reaching out
Locked like my mouth

(Screaming for a kind word)

el día de san Valentín

wet eyes quivering

echoes of laughter around corners
screaming in my ears
and my deaf heart

amor y amistad

How can the cities ever thaw
When all we have are our eyes,
Greedy for a smile and emaciated by the winter wonderland
And deadened by ennui worn as armor--
Trashbin fires consuming the smiles and sighs and frightful, lovely
Words we can never say

it's just too cold to say them
with frostbite in our hearts

Do my eyes scare you?
Do your sins live there,
Like monsters grinning at you from
A wounded abyss while you cover your ears
To silence the dark verdict (sure as sugar and no medicine
Goes down with it) that bleeds from their smiles?
Or do you turn your back and avert your eyes to celebrate the
Victory: drunken sailors crooning as the steam from their burning
Ship succumbs to the icy blue ( bright like blood diamonds)?

I'm slipping away
Piece by piece word by word laugh by laugh
Consumed by their smiles
Decaying at the bottom of their hearts

(where am i)

for my best good friend, who I love dearly. thank you.*

wild hair reaching for their hearts, she bleeds onto
the paper in runny rivulets like tears shed for the electric love
fleeing to the corners of the earth
off-target but shocked with excess

she weeps among the broken glass and ignores the mirrors
reflecting the afterthought that lies at the
end of each laugh or haircurl

heart thumping a metronomic beat to the hammers
building the palaces gleaming with sweat and preserved with salty tears

secret city under construction
eyes wet with worried incantations
pen scratching plasma onto the trees
hair alight defying the buzzcut season
in love with the sunbeams (and moon rafters)
that float with the dreams clinging to whispers

and everything glows in the haze while she closes her eyes
smiles dancing on the guitar strings
music on the heart pumping the
blood on the paper

and everything glows when she's there

our eyes starstruck on the moon rafters

To my best friend, for everything. I love you.*

definition seems to elude the soft smile and eyes (the teenage dream desperate to run)
stunned by lightning flashes and ghost hands waving in the dance that--
measure for measure--her limbs follow

how easy it is to love a monolith

where the sour limelight mocks the sweet
rough and uneven and sugared over with the words
echoing in my ears like the thudding thunder that our voices obscure
torn and laughing on the checkerboard we mock

the storms drag on in her eyes while she teaches me
glints of possibility trailing off in abandoned thoughts
poems rising in the night air she breaks
her glow streaming admiration onto our tongues
while the afterimages dance and touch and sing behind my eyelids

the whispers may die and stay stranded on the tile floors
the light ripping holes into the long-dead words
but

suddenly the words are loud
and they float from the unknown and mingle with the revolutions softly dancing
between us

she saved me