i want to peel your skin back
and reveal your deepest sweetness.
to look at your veins
and memorize their paths.
maybe then i’d understand
why you are so rough on the outside.
it takes a lot of work,
digging your fingernails into the flesh,
pulling and pulling until you are bare.
but it is all worth it;
to visit your center,
to break past what conceals you,
and take you apart
slice by slice.

Do not come too close—God will cry.
A silent watcher in the endless sky.
A duty held for endless years,
Yet even gods can drown in tears.

To see it all and never change,
To watch, unmoved, through joy and pain.
What if, one day, He let it go?
A whisper lost beneath the snow.

Would He surrender? Would He break?
Would He abandon what’s at stake?
If even He could lose His mind,
Then what of us, so weak, so blind?

if love is a sin, let it burden me.
if love is a gift, let me cherish it.

boys will be boys
when he pulls her pigtails.
boys will be boys
when he takes away her virtue.

i spoke of her as if she was a language.  
like latin, her name never died on my tongue.
if i had known earlier how our conversations exhausted her,
the weight of what i left unspoken looms over me.
perhaps, that was always the problem.
i wanted to translate my entire soul,
but she was never as curious about me.