i looked at that hole in the ground
and i thought of you.
i thought of the holes in your smile,
and the emptiness of your eyes.
i thought of late nights,
and never wanting to see the sun.
i thought of wandering hands,
and stolen naps.

i thought of feeling whole again,
and feeling loved as i loved.
i thought of waiting for you,
and how i will wait for you.
i thought of padiddle and popeye's,
and funny games and friends.
i thought of the beach at night in march,
and i thought of your porch in june.

i thought of how my heart would stop,
just watching you walk to me.
i thought of how i couldn't breathe,
just listening to you breathe beside me.

and now, three and a half months later,
i look at this empty space in my life.
i think of how easily you could fill it.
and i think of how easily i'd welcome you.

but i'm thinking, now, of you.
of how easily you walk away.
of how easily you break my heart,
steal my breath, cause my tears.
of how easily i blame myself,
when it's all your fault.

but you're leaving this summer,
and i don't care anymore.
i'll carry this broken heart.
i'll carry it until there's no hurt left.
but it won't be yours again.
have a brilliant ******* life.

she was a bird, kind of. The kind that was easy to free, you know those ones you hear outside your window on a late spring afternoon, when the sky isn’t quite yet pink but you know it will be soon, and it’s kind of a sad time.

She’s that kind of bird – the little plain brown ones that wait on the trees and suddenly you look out and it’s staring at you, giving you this sort of look that goes, “I know what you are doing and I can see you, deep inside you.” It’s sort of chilling,

but it gives you a warm feeling too, until the tips of your toenails, and you feel very stuffy.

She was that kind of bird. She would often just sit there next to you while you were drawing something, with her hand under her chin, legs crossed, leaning forward. And you would lose all focus of what you were drawing and realize that whatever it was, she would be twenty times more interesting to draw.

So you would casually flick your notebook to a new page and contemplate a few sketch marks, outlining her jaw – and what a jaw. And you would just stare at that jaw and the curve you drew on your paper, and they would look nothing alike. But you hate erasing, but you hate what’s on the paper, and you just can’t take it and you get all frustrated and all the while she’s just sitting there with her hand under her chin, legs crossed, leaning forward, and you mean to jump a little and stand up and stare at her directly in the face,

but you realize that wouldn’t be so nice. And you realize you’re acting slightly stupid, so you keep your poise and take off your shoes and socks, and it’s so nice by the fountain so you dip your toes in a little bit.

Then she turns her head a little too quickly toward you when she notices your toes in the water, and you turn toward her, surprised. She searches your face, your eyelashes, your hands, sighs and leans backward and lies down on the cement, her shirt stretching up a centimeter or two above the waistband of her pants, exposing a white thin cookie piece of her belly.

And then you want to draw her belly, except you can’t see her bellybutton which is the main part, and you get more frustrated, and all the while she’s just lying there staring up at the sky, with her legs uncrossed and her arms splayed out to either side of her, and all the while her blue and brown jacket is – oh no, she’s taking it off, oh no, and now you want to draw her arms except you can’t because you’ve pretty much just proven to yourself within the last few minutes that you can’t draw her at all. It’s so impossible, so you just don’t even open your mouth, and the water is making the bottoms of your toes wrinkly and it’s actually a little cold, so you look at her hair.

So you look at her hair rolled out clumsily on the cement and it’s beautiful, and it’s so unfair what she is, and you don’t even know what to do with yourself.

she's the kind of girl that reminds you
of summer in all the wrong ways -
of the pain in the sunburn,
or saying goodbye to what you love.
she's the kind of girl that you
need alcohol to love,
because only you know just how much
you want to forget her.
she's the kind of girl that makes you
choke back words like "****" and "failure"
for fear that one day
she might stop proving you right.
she's the kind of girl that makes you
punch your knuckles ****** against tile,
tear at hangnails,
or turn off your favorite songs.
she's the kind of girl that you have to
learn to let go of, because she sinks her teeth
so far under your skin
that it's hard to **** the poison out.

he pressed her against the wall,
the white tile leaking its cold temperature
deep into her bones.
she grabbed the rod for balance
as his tongue grazed her skin.
her fingers tangled immediately in his wet curls,
his hand cupped her cheek.
heavy moans slipped into each other's mouth
when fingers roamed.
when the heat is high,
she never knows if she'll make it out alive.
but sometimes it's all she's got.

i've got a fixation for your eyes,
       your eloquent form controls my mind,
       if you don't care, i'd like to stay awhile,
       hours are cheap, so how about the night?
i'm allured by your laughs at my feeble tries,
      when you repeal my determination,
       i will remind my adoration isn't in short supply,
       where did we land on the night?
i'm an addict when it comes to being a part of your life.

I had slowly grown so tired
Of your macro photography
And the way you used it
To take pictures of my small crises
And put your face so close to mine I could count your freckles
Your pictures of insects and petals
That no more saw depth
Than the little puddles you splashed me into
When you smelled smoke on my hair the last time
And you have so quickly passed me over
For someone more photographable at close distances
You threw out my favorite exposure
Because of the brown at the edges of the leaves
And I never once suggested
That the sun underneath your lens was what did it
I kept my mouth shut
And let you move your warmth away
When you thought I'd finally fallen asleep
And lamented to myself
That you'd never been one to enjoy
Developing the film

I am one of those people who collects bruises like old bottlecaps.
I count them from time to time, but I can never remember where
I got them.

Waiting for bread to toast, I slapped a knife against my thigh,
marveling in the way it rang like a tuning fork.  When the toast
popped up, I looked at my leg and saw there was a huge red welt
just starting to bruise.

They only hurt once I've discovered them.

You poked the knife-bruise and asked, "Who beat you up?" but didn't
wait long enough for me to summon the laughter to say that I'd done
it to myself.  You moved on to the next one, dragging your finger like
you were following some yellow brick road, playing Candyland and
winning.

A Pleiades's above my ankle, a crescent shape below my knee.

There was one small circle in the middle of my toe that you wondered
about, and neither of us could imagine how I'd done it, so you just
laughed at me and tickled my feet like some old husband.

Soon you get bored with the bruises and you move on to the tic-tac-
toe grids on my knees from the pool tiles.  You write your name in my
arm with your fingernail because of the way even light scratches
immediately become red and raised.  I made up a word for it and
you believe me like it was some sort of real medical condition.

Somehow my face hovers in between a real smile and an aching grimace,
so when you look up at me, you put my face in your hands and repeat
my name.

I must be your favorite curiosity.

I saw you bloom in winter,
bright, luminescent, the silk of fresh petals.
And I never bought any gloves, though I said I would;
hands all but frozen,
canvas shoes damp through
in the mud and wet of a french winter on the coast.
But you looked hardly discouraged,
fresh and new under the rain.
You amaze me still.
And I am never prepared anymore:
I left my pocket knife across the ocean
and my hat in a friend's purse in another city.
I wasn't ready to see you
arrayed in all your enthusiasm;
wasn't ready to pick you,
place you next to my bed
and tell you all my midwinter thoughts each morning.
I walked past, left you in the park,
asked myself why I thought you'd opened for me.
I'll think of you at Christmas, and at New Year's,
and there will be others, poinsettias and orchids.
But you showed yourself to me in the park, in that cold rain.
You
you amaze me still.

I.
I'll rechristen you, probably something that
I'll later regret, even later forget.
I'd like to tape record everything you
say, to think about the symbolism
later.  You know, if you talk for long
enough, you'll rhyme sometimes.
And I don't think that's anything
to be ashamed of, because good
accidents happen all the time.

II.
I always waste the happy accident,
afraid someone will try to tell me that I
did it on purpose.  I think it was an
accident when you held my hand, but
I'm not sure if I could call it happy.  You
always smell sort of smoky, and so do
your hands, and it gives you a sort of
accidental air, like you were falling
lightly through life, letting moments fall
and break, splitting open like flowers.

III.
I want to twist my hands over the rest of
your body to find the place where you
keep little hateful things that you pretend
you don't have.  Press down ******* the
spot with fingers and maybe it'll hiss out
like sickly steam from a kettle.  I'll cup
them in my hands and you'll refuse to taste
them, acting like you never knew they
were there.  You pretend you're incapable
of a lot of things, but you know the tastes
too well.

but i bet you don't know how hard it is.
and i bet you don't know how much i want to run.
because i can't tell you everything and
i can't talk about my past
and the things that were important to me, well.
you don't want to hear about them.
and all my special memories are ruined and
i can't share them with you because
you don't want to hear about them.

and all i want to do is to pretend that
we didn't meet the way we did and
we aren't tied together the way we are and
that i don't cry myself to sleep a few nights a week and
i don't ******* love you as much as i do and

you just can't understand.