darling, there will be days when our cheeks are slicked wet from the rainstorms within our hearts, when i will be rendered unable to disengage from the safety of my blankets, when i will ask for you to hold me until i no longer feel as if i am breaking.  there will be nights when i smoke countless cigarettes until my throat is ragged & it is easier not to speak, when i will not allow myself to eat because i believe i do not deserve it, when i will call long after you have fallen to sleep, desperately seeking your voice through the static because i am afraid i will forget the way it resonates in my eardrums.

but even this certain pain, my love, my own one, will make us better.  you will see me destroyed & vulnerable, flawed with need.  we will strip each other bare to our truest of selves & fall in love with that sheer beauty beneath.  i give you my undying adoration, the ever-present reaching of my arms, my boundless, uncontained love.  

you are the spark of stars illuminating my night sky, you are coursing with urgency through my bloodstream, you are everywhere & our time is now.  i will love you fragile.  i will love you strong.  
oh darling, i will kiss your fingertips each & every night before together we dream.

some nights, i dream of waking in a cocoon of your sleeping warmth, our listless bodies becoming a hymnal of limbs.  & this is heresy when i want nothing more than to need nothing.  i tried not to adhere to you like breath to a winter morning, but my heart is a betrayal.  we could be a never-ending symphony of skin & sweat & sunshine , the look of you is a country i would like to someday visit.  you are lightning storms in my synapses, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs in your wake, the pieces of you i will never erase.  you are everywhere & this is significant enough for me to imagine endless mornings more tangible than any dreamland, or even just one, just to learn if you too taste like yearning.

i wrote you a relentless slew of love letters and gave you all my artwork.  you left them all scattered haphazardly throughout your room, never once bothering to keep them safe.  you never valued anything i gave to you, even in knowing they were all extensions of my tumultuous, uncontainable love for you.  i stopped giving you those things made of my love because you tread thoughtlessly upon them with your bare feet, underwriting my creations.
2. you said i was worth the work, but you never put it in.  i showed you the trainwreck of scars laddering my skin, the bones protruding from beneath, told you about how i swallowed all those pills wishing for a quick ending, then starved for years because i thought i deserved death slow & painful.  i told you i hated myself.  i told you i felt unlovable.  i cried in front of you, exposed in a splendor of shame & total vulnerability, & all you had in response was an awkward little laugh & “well, you don’t look too skinny” you left for work & i cried my heart out.  i don’t blame you for being foolish & insensitive, but regardless, *******.  
3. when you are high, which is always, you become replaceable with any other body.  you repeat the same stories, tell the same jokes, expect me to find you relentlessly charming. you zone in on youtube videos that are not ******* funny, stop laughing at them, it is all so pointless. you are redolent with intellect wasted away on the drugs, mere chemicals that entertain you far more than i ever did.
4. the moment you took me for granted, i knew i was going to walk away.
5. the night after my sister tried to **** herself, after i sought you out for comfort & all you gave me was apathy, i traced a razor across my skin, contemplating her decision.  i didn’t tell you, but i’m not sorry.
6. you always felt the need to remind me i was free, but i already knew.  i am my own person.  this is something i have always known.  you never had the power to influence the way i lived my life or the people i loved & still love & will always love.  don’t ever think you had that power over me.
7. don’t ever tell me i do not need to change.  there are things i have to fix about myself.  not all of my flaws are beautiful.  do not romanticize me.  do not turn me into some idea you have of me in your head.  i am not a beautiful and heavenly creature, I am a human girl & i have made mistakes.
8. i care about you, but i care about myself more, & this is why i am walking away.
9. the damage is irreparable.  i wasted my time believing you could love me the way i wanted you to, but you can’t & you won’t & that is okay.  i do not resent you for it, but you need to let me go.  i am not your dream girl & you are not for me. do not cling to the illusion of who you think i am.  let me go.
10. i am leaving because this time, i don’t just think i deserve better.  i know.

we waited for nightfall before making love to the moon,
smoking hand-rolled cigarettes in the breathless aftermath, a
poetry of flesh on flesh & your bright eyes on mine.  i didn’t apologize for the asymmetry of my ******* or the silver scars laddering my wrists,
the cartography of a suicide left incomplete.  you look at me  like i am something worth loving
& all i need are your grasping palms, your shameless love, your
beautiful heart beating against my chattering bones.  we erupt into a star-stained sky,
explosions of everything trapped within us spinning into the stoic dark.  you infinities of beautiful & i give you my all.

you call me e because i said i liked it; this is something more sacred than any god & ******* if my ******* heart doesn't riot every time your bright eyes trip over mine.  be wild with me, mon chere, be free.  we can capture an entourage of looks in each other’s’ faces with careful photographs, but there’s nothing quite like the topography of your cheekbones between my trembling palms.  your every word falls softly beautiful – did you know that?

we smoke hand-rolled cigarettes just to be awash in the splendor of it all, but i don’t tell you i like to feel the disintegration of my organs in a thick cloud of menthol & formaldehyde.  i don’t tell you i still press fingers to the back of my raw-skinned throat, just to know i haven’t lost the courage.  without new scars healing on my delicate wrists & sweet-sour pills dancing in my blood, i am nothing worth remembering.  every night, i fall asleep with my cat snuggled warm against my clattering bones & measure my stomach with trembling palms, afraid that i have suddenly erupted from my wispy shape into something breathing.  a girl of no substance, dark matter where flesh once lived, hollowed perfection in the stiff arrangement of limbs on a crooked frame.  you kiss my knees goodnight; we don’t mention you are sad again or that i am becoming a skeleton.  your teeth are serrated, sweet against my neck.  your hips are songbirds, dipping into my belly, begging with a lust i can’t feel anymore.  your body is heavy & all i want is sleep, the sweetness of a pillow beneath my icy cheek, the passage of time without the constant obsession over infinite sins.  i never promised you a rose garden, so welcome in the monster.

there’s a reason for the way my heart quivers
when you speak, when you are silent,
you are here, you are not here.  but your name stills my lips,
courses through my ebbing veins, i feel you
igniting my bones all the same.

i love with the whole of my being: give my all,
give you my everything, with the knowledge
that it might never be enough.
you may realize
i am not worth the work.  i will give you
the potential to ruin me & if you do,
every second will be precious
because this means you will have meant
to me.

what matters is this: you make me feel
like a person.  your smile never ceases
to scrub my soul soft & clean
with light & i want
all of you, your every insignificant
thought, your slightest
expressions, your seething
hurt.  give me
your goriest depths &
i will believe them beautiful.

& if you leave, when
you leave, there will be nothing to
forgive.  i will watch
your lovely, retreating form with
a smile smoldering my lips because
you happened to me,
you mattered,
& this will sometimes be difficult
to recall to memory, but i will not
forget.

you have taught me to be brave,
brazen, unabashed, unafraid.
the wanting you is worth the probability
of losing & failing.  you are worth it.  
i give you myself, i give you
my love.

the future is your fingers threading my hair.
my manic hands clutching at your t-shirt
to desperately hold you closer. your breath
becoming my breath. the deathless
entanglement
of our more-than-selves.

[i dive within the catacombs of my heart
for an answer & emerge with
youyouyou]

i’m not supposed to try and write to you or contact you or even think of you as often as i do, but i miss you.  i ******* miss you like winter & nighttime smoke fixes & pure unadulterated bliss.  it hurts to care for you as much as i do because we are an impossibility, the insolvable equation with no easy compromise.  you aren’t supposed to think about me either, but i must cross your mind sometimes, if you meant half the things you said.  i just want you to worry about me, to care for me, to wonder about me.  i need to matter, because i’m worthless without someone to pull me from disaster time after time.  i’m  bleeding again & this time it’s deep.  caring for my body has been pushed to the sidelines in favor of oblivion & self-destruction.  the weeks after graduation, i spent them in a ****** blur of mindlessness & self-hatred in the lucid moments that were few & far between.  i wish i told you why i wrote all that poetry, that it was all personal, that i lied when i said i was okay.  i need a friend, a body beside me, anyone to talk to at three in the morning when i’m crying & don’t know why.  this hurts like everything else, but you are a strand of something wishful, because maybe you care more than you said & you want to save me as much as i want to be saved.

you are quiet sometimes,
the stillness lingering in the
pauses between words, the breaths
of reflection.  i like
the way your heart is sweet.  i like
the residue of pain residing in your
forehead, a permanent flesh memory
of the suffering we were both
ignited with,
engulfed in,
lost to.

you too have thrown yourself
down the rabbit hole, begging for
an ending, but
i will not be another
sad story.  we are not
tragedies today & i will breathe
with reason & for
you.

i am sinking to the seabed
with the weight of the world; tell me
i am not alone, wallowing down in
these depths.  tell me
one thing i’ll believe is
true.

i can swear a million promises & wish on
dandelion seeds that this is forever,

but then again,
someday, the earth will fall in love
with my body & you will forget
my name.

i will give to you a piece of myself that will attach itself to your heart.  no matter how meticulously you carve with a scalpel, no amount of time spent playing self-surgeon will remove this part of me from your organs & flesh.  it will evade your every attempt to erase me.  you will never erase me.
2. when i said i loved you too, it wasn’t a reflexive gesture said only to complement your whispered ‘i love you.’  i said the words because i couldn’t bear not to.
3. the coffee i bring to you every morning & the goodnight-kisses stamped ceaselessly to your forehead will tell you all the things i cannot say.
4. by some fated or perhaps coincidental quirk of the universe, we became us.  i will clap a hand across your mouth any time you question how or why because it is irrelevant.  
5. i will bend until i break for you.  i will bleed rivers & hurt until i gasp with pain because you are allowed to see me at my ugliest (no pain like this body).
6. there will be bad days & good days.  you will wonder if i am worth the work & i will try desperately to prove you wrong.  i will push & shove & scream, but beneath it all, i will wish i could be selfish enough to ask you not to leave.
7. never will i ever learn how not to love you.

& tell me you picture me naked before falling to sleep at night because you like me vulnerable.  i like me raw & wanting beneath your steady frame, the stars flee into the night when I cry out against your collarbones, a sweet, shivering finale. broken into a million parts, we puzzle piece each other back together stroke by stroke.  the trees in your backyard shudder with the lost weight of autumn while i lay you down & love you.  kiss my fragile limbs with your everything, adhering some flesh to these bird bones with your cathartic touch until I am better.  until I am whole.  turn off the lights & we’ll do our ghost thing in the dark.  dans la nuit, nous dansons, either way.

we exist together
on some alternate continuum of
the physical world, a secret
corner of consciousness,
chances reality & the universe
would never grant us.

(somewhere in this mad world, i am
yours)

forget age & years & impossibility.
i knew
from the moment i memorized you.  you & your
brittle ribs &
soft lips &
geisha feet.  you
infinities of beautiful & eyes
Lake Michigan, sparkling waters hold
indefinite light.

(i love you, but
your bones show through)

you pretty lost girl,
the raddest human i’ve ever seen.
be my porcelain dolltoy &
i’ll kiss your every waking limb.

you were the only one
who thought to ask & i could have
cried, because you knew.  you knew, & it was
all right.  because you were
the first,
you were
the only
& forgive me for my
bright eyes
feverish
on you.

I fell out of love with myself as others fell in, stumbling
Through the winter of my life in search of a body bag
Or the percussive clatter of bones beneath the façade of a porcelain doll,
Pretty & perfect with empty eyes to cast upon the world.
my body was made to be carved into something beautiful.
the dizziness threads in & out, veering in & out of consciousness,
my eyes are brimming with psychedelic stars.  
I am alone, cold & wanting, awash in
the terrible potential for human connection.

hello, your baby-brown-eyes flutter rad vibes into my shivery heart a mess with unsung feeling, we will stargaze a thousand nights together, this i know, my beautiful.  your beautiful is torturous & seductive as hell, i long, i yearn, i spin, perpetuate circles my head bowed to your toes, tell me your gory & everything.  i will keep you secret, i will keep you safe.  summer's kiss bestowed upon our rosy cheeks, we will walk through winterland with hands clasped tight, it is salvation.  hallelujah your unabashed love, your brimming heat, your humanity.  connection to connection, we become live wires every time our minds marry themselves in electric emotion, light the night, so ******* beautiful.  feel the love i send to you even when i am gone.  together in entangled wavelengths, in constant thought.  together in conscious attachment ascending rhyme or reason, in knowledge & understanding, in open wounds.