The teacher wrote a question on the board
large enough to see but,
still hard to follow,
in black expo:

If each color had a taste, what would sad taste like?
And the girl with crosses up and down her arm
mentioned once,
'blue tasted like flat soda pop,
cold and a bit too sweet'

The boy with the hair running smoothly over his eyes
pronounced sixty four ways to say 'azure'
and each time,
he tasted the iron of the
hammer that his father had split his collarbones apart

and I cried for each story,
because the color 'blue'  always
tasted like brandy, heartbreak and broken nails

oh, you made the common winter flu virus
jealous the way you dispersed yourself
inside my veins and refused to go without a
fight;

disheveling every fragment and fiber
that supports my frail bone structure,
provoking all 25 trillion two hundred million white blood
cells, rattling about in the stream that
keeps me alive and;

with this,
I noticed the way you ordered yourself to be
a bandage, but I soon discovered you stitched
it on too petulantly for my liking

Perhaps, you are the winter flu in bad times
but everyone knows that I’m
already sick for you

I promised you i’d plant those **** pink roses but
that Sunday morning that you broke me in ways
even my best friend didn’t think was possible

and i realized it was probably a good thing
that the whole thing was a production of strictly pretend;
a play, a script, an authors first mistake-

that day, i clipped every last flower
off and set the remains in a little drawer
with shards of glass i broke in my sleep
because i loved you every single day

despite my
i’m over you i’m over you i’m over you
that i repeated with the foolish hope of
convincing somebody that air still funnels through my lungs

and it’s come to my attention that
i’d pick my head over my heart but that is only
because i am a toy car abandoned by every single
pair of hands to wind it up and let it go

And yes, I will reduce my emotions to dust or
enlarge them in full zoom but
I cannot get over that fact that the clementines rotted in front
of us and

you devoured the part of me that let my heart reign over
my head and snapped the key to my rib cage;

you promised you would keep it safe and
you *lied

You kept your fish hook out
so long that you forgot it was out there, and
now it’s the time for you to leave but

I still want you to stay, circling the bait
with my fins teasing your taut line; you watch as
i bite into petulance greater than infinity
(if there was such a thing)

and i claim i went after another: a thinner wire
a stronger lead weight, a further cast

but even you see past these big
snow globe eyes equidistant as your
debonair lures me in as my final
gulp of home drags me up to your arms

When you found out I favored writing poetry
you probably thought I was into haiku
because I loved to be precise but,
I remind you that I'm not one for
style-

the words always spill out, boiling
scalding water traveling up my trakia
dragging parts of my tissue as it
entered the real world; and it was judgement day

it hurts being dimwitted,
dull as you say I am, plastered across a door mat
as you invite everyone to wipe their feet on
the girl with the air filled personality, but
the kind heart

Your opinion always meant the most to me
and now that you're gone,
understand that I forgive you

Solitude like honey glazed donuts?*
more like barbed wire, engrossed you in
a casing of something called a torn
aorta

and it's pulsing, critically injured
doubtful that hope will tie every loose end
you're made of like
unwound thread, a dried piece of clay
left out too long (as you were)

and the artist stands- and does not visually
preview the masterpiece but
creates one in her mind

that maybe the boy who almost fixed
her,
allowed himself to be the scab
one last time

Oh that little daring, cunning slime
of a man that rips girls hearts with
butter knives finally found himself
painfully, undoubtedly

in love with a painter whom had taken up
writing poetry like a fool
continuing to dwell on the open heart surgery performed by the
mess of a future doctor that she loved way more
than those poems;

this surgery wasn't done properly
leaving her with an irregular heartbeat
along with a thicker skull

and the boy who threw matches at her heart to solve
all her problems
accidentally burned up her ribcage

There goes that boy that misses every
detail you are, and yet you murmur about
how you're an overly rusted bike in an
abandoned parking lot

He waits on you, he washes your dishes right
after you finish your plate of self hatred and
he replaces them with the words
you are way stronger than you believe yourself to be
and he writes
casual love notes on the palms of your hands because
he knows that you secretly depend on words
to make it another day-

But every time he wipes your bloodied war face
and pounds the salt from the tears on your eyes
with
you're unique, you're wonderful, you're lovely

you think he's wants something,
***, a hook up, what you dish out to the
boys with the overused pick up lines like an ice cream
truck in mid July

but darling, he really means it this time
he likes you, sorta