just stay with me forever and read this
writing on my walls s l o w l y without a single
pause.
here is where the meaning lies,
in someone else’s train of words.

there’s no one quite like you,
angel bones and raw beauty with a
perceptivity like something foreign.

i’ll listen; your words follow me like
lost ships to phantom harbors.
you are the tides coaxing in the sea.
maybe someday, I’ll tell you
every/thing.

here in the une ve n silences between lines,
i don’t have to be perfect; you don’t care,
and that has made
all the difference.

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.

sometimes, a kiss is not just a kiss.  sometimes, it tastes like absolution & leaves fires of desire burning in its aftermath.  i wrote in my journal that i loved you on october ninth.  three weeks before i was brave enough to actually confess that to you.  that night, you held me with your whole body & i loved you with my longing limbs.  that night, you left my eyes wet & wanting because finally, there was you.

& now there is you & i cling manic to your delicate frame.  our fingers make love every time they entwine.  you kiss me tongue deep, whisper your love into my neck, & i forget how to hate myself a little more each time.  the number on the scale is a great unknown, but i am not afraid, not when you touch me urgently with such tenderness & stroke my stomach.

all i need is you & i will give the best of myself.  put down the liquor & the cigarettes that only serve to **** me quicker.  smash the mirrors with my fists & look to my reflection in the glow of your eyes instead  to see that i am beautiful.  with you, i do not need to carve myself into something worth loving.  with you, all i want to feel is love.  & my god, all i want to have is you.

hello cinematic sky dripping dead birds &
your moonshine eyes.  nothing burns sweeter than
the liquor on our tongues when they twine tighter
than a newborn's clenched fist.  you so lost ships. you
empty cornfield.  wanna bury my body in your fleshly limbs.
feel the tattoo of your heart.  there's a bullet with
my name on it.  you can be a pistol or you can be
the stars.  either way, i beneath you always. watch the
fireflies make love as my lights go out.

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.

you say love a string of nonsense words hung like christmas lights about our ankles & fades like broken radios losing their verve.  i say everything in case you might stay awhile but you all out the back door faster than a vulture to the ****.  my fingers twining yours & it’s not romantic when you whirl me into motion like some blue-eyed marionette.  you say i’m so familiar & don’t believe me when i swear i’m alright.  the truth is an emergency waiting to happen.  you so skinny thighs & ******* beautiful.  you sharp teeth sunk deep into my flesh & we all out of gauze.

i can’t believe i’d forgotten how
you would talk to me until two, sometimes three
in the morning, nonstop messages
fingers taking flight over the keys,
telling me stories, sometimes just
listening, incessantly
exposing yourself in
uncompromised open wounds.

now, it’s not quite the way it was
now, i tell myself
this doesn’t mean anything.
that we shift & settle
like dust
upon past incarnations
of us, but i miss what you gave me
early in the morning,
filling the space within my chest
that is often
empty, giving me truths &
performing absolutions
for all my past sins.

the truth is, i am no longer
the shiny new toy you are
desperate to play with
every second
of every day
i am the book at your bedside,
measuring my days by
when you turn my pages
& when you don’t
wanting you to devour me
whole
once again.

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.

even after all this time, your still, quiet form slumbering beside me never ceases to amaze me, those long eyelashes, longer than the length of my thumbnail, fluttering against my cheek still make my heart quiver, the essence of you lingering on my lips hasn’t failed to stay sacred to me.  all this time & the simple happenstance of your perpetuate presence warms me to the core.  i cannot, have not, will never take you for granted, not when your soothing silence is as captivating as when you speak, not when you are the most breathtaking discovery i continue to make day by day by day.  you have taught me how to savor, drink my coffee in slow sips sluicing down my throat, the pauses between swallows made for languid eye contact with you.  you have laid me down & loved me to breathy, shivering pieces, we have charted the topography of one another’s bodies with needing fingers, a little more “touch me” than i knew i could feel.  my head always races in labyrinthine circles but you slow it to a halt with your lips & skin & brimming heat.  i mean, maybe i’m a little broken, maybe even a lot, but with you, i don’t mind so much anymore.

my bones are yours for holding & we watch the planets collide.  your naked knees bowed against my newborn flesh.  i don’t trust anyone with the moon & where were you when the world collapsed?  the universe broke when i learned to love you, forbidden symmetry found in some terrible tangle of muscles & tissue.  i wore my favorite old t-shirt, cotton stained with blotted cream & coffee, you clung to me, frenetic fingers begging for some semblance of union.  we so blurred lines became invincible in our quaking presence.  we are entwined, a knotted strand of genetic material & starstuff, quoting communist daughters’ poetry & commanding a listen.  listen.  carl sagan is my personal jesus, I tell you, for nothing is romantic like biology.  there are notches in my hips for your resting elbows, your trembling palms, this is where you belong.  young eyes cracked open wide, we are spinning into the depths of some luminous night, human shells shed far behind.  we are divine.  we are celestial.  this is who we are.

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.

& 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.

you try to stroke the bowl of my belly, it's not romantic & sends the sea swimming my muddy eyes a flood.  your mouth sounds out words; they ask how i'm feeling, but i don't tell you what i didn't eat for breakfast this morning or the triple digit number of calories shoved down my throat yesterday.  i don't mention the measuring tape noosed about my waist, just to keep those twenty-two inches slender.  how could i explain how sometimes i gently imagine wild animals tearing off my flesh them teeth scalpel sharp until me a pile of glittering bones.  until i am perfect.  you desert mirage.  you so so very sweet leaf tea dancing on my tongue & these days, i miss you like summer when you drive to the movies.  wanna wrap my narrow ankles round & round your blue black throat & sink my teeth deep in your lower lip.

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.