your svelt form lives in sellers of
shivering bodies and creeping hands,
of a galaxy spun,
from not your ember eyes,
nor your cotton skin,
but the cascade of stars,
embroidered onto your wrinkled face like honor,
or worship or fame.

you just wanted to be loved,
by earth or sea or from abusive winds,
or by my own scared-to-touch fists,
grazing over you as though you were molten lava,
a possessed vessel, kept by the devil.

but lightning only lived in dark skies,
and the sea only roared when it was about to rain,
and the earth only moved around you,
the earth never bothered to hold you,

not like I did.

on breezeless, cold-kissed nights,
where my finger spun into your hair,
where i tried to create webs around the bony joints,
you lay motionless,
underneath a halcyon sun,
trying to gather warmth,
trying to gather something more than my hands could give.

you spoke tender,
voice breakable,
and i didn’t speak at all.

on charcoal painted streets,
where the yellow matched the gold in your eyes,
where trees lay dead lost things on the side,
where your eyes wandered to them
like an adrift soul,
in desire of being rediscovered.

you picked wilted flowers,
And gone gilt grass.
I ached for you to pick me, instead.

you crept along side me like a shadow,
blind to my wanting eyes,
my settled smile.

the rain didn’t fix us,
the sun didn’t mend you,
the perished daisies just served to your broken hand like a band-aid.

But it was always more than I could give you.

It was always more than my battered self could offer.

we are sentient,
we carve ourselves from gravel,
from volcanic rock and dying evergreen.

we crawl through clouds of dust,
limp on injured feet, tired hands.
we are arbitrary, we evolved to decay.

because we live in graveyards of our own
before,
dead selves.
we bury grief, after every
collapse, every bitter break of these bones.

we keep our skin as treasure.
we dig out our eyes,
to replace them with hands,
as if what we see,
could somehow be grasped,
and what he hold,
could somehow become lost.

cotton,
cotton we wove from webbed skin,
from burnt hair.

veins,
that were never meant to burst,
veins we thread needles through,
as if they were yarn,
as if they were something we could use to stitch ourselves back up again.

where did we go - were we just erased?

from this cage,
where we settled our remains into a mountain we tried to escape out of,

from this garden of panic,
where we planted our hearts into tulips,
where we refused to pluck them, in fear they would sprout into weeds,

from this nest of lust,
where we gathered broken bones instead of leaves,
where we fed the other in hopes to starve ourselves.

from this river of guilt,
and these lips that never spoke,


my shadow creeps towards a sky that’s forgotten how to breathe,
your eyes close, hazing into a soprano moon.

It sings us both to sleep.

the clouds looked like waves,
we lay, accumulated underneath them,
like lost souls, scattered like dust,
like wingless leaves, like our drifting fingers,
tracing stars, writing our names into them.

it wasn’t raining, but it festered on the brink of,
like a lover holding back, like an abuser, keeping his fist clenched shut,
like us, trying not to roll over the other,
trying not to steal each other's innocence.
maybe we just wanted to be corrupt,
maybe we taught sin with these lips we held agape,
trembling over fragile words, trembling over hollow bones,
like these knobby knees, dancing over damp earth,
dancing under a bleeding moon, and these arms we called our feathers,
unfolded into frostbit air, but stitched around mountains of spine.

we’ve forgotten what it means to fall,
because we just creep now, afraid to find the edge,
afraid our bodies will dissolve into the soil,
we once before tried to bury ourselves in,

the clouds swayed, forming around each other to fit,
gripping one another, like our own hands did.
we smiled, bodies sinking into embers.

I prayed we’d find the waves and get lost in them,
you said we already were.

It started out with gravel and bruising spines,
with my hands wound round your throat and your fingers,
scraping skin from my wrists.
It started out with a dark sun, hiding itself behind the hairs of trees,
unmoving like asleep, or dead.
the streets were empty, and quiet like how I wanted you to be,
but you were screaming and begging for rescue,
and I just wanted to bury your head underwater,
or between my thighs, anchoring you there, immobile.

It was noon but it felt like dusk,
the wind was nothing but a fragile, empty gasp from your lungs,
and the shaking ground enveloping us, was not an earthquake,
nor a crashing plane, just your begging-for-breath, body
and our own fears settling tightly around our clayed bones.
And the wet on my face wasn’t from rain, or hailing skies,
it was from the flood of words you tried to drown me in,
us in.

“I want you to disappear”
you yelled
and I replied,
“I would disappear, as long as I had you, beside me”

It felt like it was snowing but the sun was burning roses into our naked chests,
it felt like winter, maybe because your fingers felt that of a dead man's,
or perhaps it was because we were both slowly fading away under a fiery sky,
thawing out, and then being left to dry.

we had these eyes of ours, woven shut, and these screams we worshiped, webbed into pleading sobs and pitiful amends.
I felt like a sinner, and you felt like a priest, blessing this unholy vessel I remained in.

a bruise was blossoming around your neck, holding on as if my hand was still kept there.
I turned my body into a cave and you turned yourself into it, as though you were a beggar, seeking shelter, seeking warmth, seeking something.

It was dusk, but it felt like we were already dead.

i want to forget,
        forget these bruised bones and how they got that way.
i want to forget,
         forget this emaciated body and walk away from it,
I want to forget,
         forget why my twig fingers dug into this dirt, dug into an empty grave,
but it hasn’t rained in six months, it hasn’t rained since you died.

I want to forget,
         but the flowers on my bedside table are not even flowers anymore,
     and the picture of you doesn’t even look like you, and these stupid poems of love and forever only announce themselves later on as *******.
               Because love is not something you gave me, love is something I only offered up to you as a sacrifice of my own existence. Love is all i had to give and you didn't even want it from me.

I want to forget,
          forget about the ****** knuckles, forget about how afterwards
   you would lay me down in a warm bath and wash off the blood and everything else you etched into this already broken skin.
                But it hasn’t snowed since last november, and last november you didn’t even know my name.

On this stiff soil, with the sun cascading itself through fingers of dead trees, i almost think i hear your name, like you’re echoing it off of your sorry tongue, like you want to unbury yourself, like you want to go back to where you didn’t stop for me, where you didn’t tell me your name.

                      I wish the same, i wish the same but all i can bring myself to do is cry over a body that never even deserved crying for.