Mankind learned to run and hide
and has been running and hiding ever since.
That first time in the garden
when nakedness made shame a reality
the knowledge we ingested from the serpent.

I'm not sure if you care much about me, I don't care much about me either, but ever since you came back after a year you've been flowing from the ink of my pen to my paper and I can't stop ******* writing about you.
I mostly sit in coffee shops thinking of how your left hand would spread across your cracked mug and how your right hand would grip my thigh, because you told me you always had to be touching me in one way or another to make up for the times you were too far to see the same stars as me. I see you carving our names into the wooden table and I'm tracing your lips with my cut up fingers and the only time you can tell me you love me is after a shot and a kiss or two. I never liked coffee until I tasted it tattooed on your lips and there I swallowed every apology for how much I drank and the way I ****** because both are so violent and both left us naked and crying until you held me so tight i thought my veins would burst, but I'd never tell you to stop.
Walking to the bus stop I confuse your eyes with street lights and maybe its because I'm slightly tipsy and in love with you. I hold your cut up hands, you told me your mom was trying to hurt you but you were as numb as you were when she slapped you, and you never cried. At the bus stop I kissed you so hard and your tears mixed with our saliva and I thought the four oceans had spilled from your beautiful eyes. On the bus I held you until you felt limp in my arms and I looked into your eyes and saw the street lights flicker and I made you get off at the next stop, even though we had 5 more to go. You had goosebumps covering your porcelain skin and you told me you had no idea who you were without your sadness in between sobs that shook my lungs and made me cry too.
Loving you is writing poetry so your eyes don't wander away from me even though I break pieces of myself to give to you so you'll stay, and that's not love but it's the only love I'll ever know.
Loving you is asking constantly if you've stopped loving me because self doubt swallows me whole and vomits apologies that tumble out of my mouth for the ways I try to **** myself I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry
Loving you is echoing words I need to hear, hoping it'll quiet the voices in your head telling you to do terrible things to your body.
Loving you is listening to the 1975 and hearing your name in between each chord and god ****** I love you
Loving you is never knowing how you are but always knowing you're in your car, because you never like staying at home, and baby that's okay.
Loving you is never knowing the colours of your eyes because they always switch from brown to green and oh god I'm so scared for the day you won't be here.
Loving you is knowing that you have me tucked away in the back pocket of your skinny jeans but not knowing when you'll take me out and tell me you love me, because I do love you.
and I love you is big for me, it's an anxiety attack formed in words it's trying to speak with bruised lips from kissing you too hard it's breathing in water, but baby we're both drowning so we might as well hold hands and sink together.

i can still feel his hands around my neck.
the fingers like words and “i don’t love you” and it stings although he wasn’t the first to say it, i can’t breathe.
she haunts our hallways, our floorboards are cracking
beneath our feet, our home is crumbling
between our fingertips and
i can feel her weight on my chest. sometimes
i think that she should just go by the way that her footsteps echo after she’s gone. i remember
a wall full of holes from where his fists
kissed ever so gently.
i think that wall is what my heart might look like but lately
i’ve had trouble finding my pulse.
i can still feel his hands around my neck.
does he know
why i can’t look him in the eye? does he
know
the blue makes me feel like I’ve swallowed too much water, does he know i can’t breathe?
i think I’m still trying to understand why
beautiful things die in my fingertips and why he stomps on every rooting bulb my wilting body tries to plant, why he ripped my roots from beneath my feet and why my hair started to fall out why
he put his hands on my throat and how i still feel them there.
has he figured it out?
does he know that lemon scented bleach would taste better than
her on his lips and the *******
they splatter?
i can still feel his hands around my neck.
i was born into light, into pain, into love and
he wasn’t the first man to leave a mark on my body and i feel like he is the works with the universe to watch me fall
things fall and shatter without you touching them, things break while you’re sleeping and
everything about him and her stings like saltwater and everything about me
bends for him like light.
i can still feel his hands around my ******* neck.
he crashed into her hips like his hands to my bones, like fists to walls, the walls
rattled, my ribcage
rattled, he was
rattled and i can still feel his hands around my neck,
pushing, like me trying to ******* make this work.
what is this?
his hands are like ghosts around my throat,
the memory of her wrapped around his body instead of me
wrapping, holding in place
icanstillfeelhisfuckinghandsaroundmyfuckingneck
i am not stupid you know.
i can only see that he moves like these words write themselves, and he
speaks like music bleeding through a closed window,
i swear, i am still cracked
though i still have tattoos left from the tips of his fingers from those heavy-handed nights,
i swear, they didn’t even sting.

Sometimes the words I love you swarm like hornets behind my teeth, a phrase so heavy it only has eight letters just like I lost you.
Sometimes in the pause you take before you speak, I wonder if you’re fighting to keep down the same things as I am; trying to swallow a confession that seems less like a secret and more like stating the obvious.
We were funny, we were bad at holding hands, I hated when a car goes over the tracks, you had this way of making silence the loudest sound in the room when it hit the floor.
I made a home out of your hands just like how many beautiful things go without reciprocation.
We seem to have found fault in being whole, somewhere alone the way, we’ve started enjoying breaking things;
Like my ribs when you’re gone and I want to know if you can tell the difference between the absence of my voice and silence.
You are the only thing I’ve ever let go that makes my hands ache.
I’m still trying to piece together what made you lose your faith in me, was it how everything starts with gritting teeth and everything ends with you walking away? I should’ve known, the way you used to hold my back like you were checking it for exit wounds.
It took me 2 car wrecks and 6 shattered mirrors for me to realize that the world has so much more to say when it is silent;
if I didn’t bruise so easily, if I wasn’t looking for a way to be made of a river, if I needed the silence to mean something, then I would ask you to build me out of quiet revenge and goodbyes that stick in your sides like tree branches, I would need you to build me out of reasons to believe instead of reasons to be afraid, I would turn my kneecaps into strawberries in exchange for potter’s hands so I could mild you a bulletproof spirit.
It was silence and your lighter, I was cold, you were drinking; that was our backbone.
You were alone, I was going too fast because sometimes you don’t have to be in the wrong place to be looking for the wrong thing.
I am afraid and you are warm; this is the beginning of a forest fire filled with broken glass shattering in broken homes with broken people inside on a broken piece of land in a city that has too much rain for someone to build an emergency room in.
I spend nights up until my body can’t handle itself any longer,
mornings have come like a hammer to my head-
instead of my face, all I can see in the mirror is an unfamiliar expression,
something like a dead battery.
All I ever wanted was for you to be my fire, I am tired of these old lives and would like to see them burn.