No, I've never writ of butterflies-
pretty things that flit about the flowers.
I've often thought to catch so dear a prize,
but then found better use for fleeting hours.
They won't be caught and if caught can't be kept
unless their hunter's more than passing cruel.
So, watch them, watch each flower they've o'er leapt...
then watch their sick pursuers, each a fool.
For if caught, then, what then? Forever trapped?
Those tender wings would break in any hand,
they'll batter 'gainst their bars till will's full sapped.
The corpse of what once flew has no demand.
Hold anything to tightly and it dies,
but no, I've never writ of butterflies.

He is tall.
So tall.
Too tall.
So tall that I have to look up to meet his eyes,
but it’s worth it.
Because his eyes are black.
Humorous.
Sparkling.
Sarcastic.
Smirking.
And his mouth is high up.
But it’s worth it.
Because his mouth is perfect.
Smirking at me, he knows what I’m thinking.
****** *****.
He’s too tall.

I walk the world with thoughts of you
In every place I go
Your voice is on the winter wind
Your footprints in the snow
And every tool I try to use to scrape you from my mind
Cuts your name onto my tongue
And beats me till I'm blind
I layed my head upon your knees and breathed the air you breathed
I cut myself when you were cut to know just how you bleed
Now as I walk this empty earth with nothing but a face
To breathe me and to bleed me
Until I leave this place

There’s a girl.
She lives somewhere between Dayton
and the rusty, old tracks of Georgia.
Lips like cinnamon, hips like sugar.
She smells like October but shines like summer.

But underneath,
she’s calloused and bruised.
Surviving off an *****
that only pumps blue,
matching the hues of her arms.
You can read them like a book,
                                          they tell her story.

Her tears could fill the empty
keg her cheating boyfriend drinks from,
as she cries her galactic eyes to sleep.

She awakes, breathes easy,
but stays.

As if to prove she has heart, by letting him break it.
As if to prove he loves her, by letting him break her.

Guys with long hair have agendas. And if they don't, they're stoners and 'agenda' a really long word, man.

Guys with long hair are the poetic types with acoustic guitars and incense in their dorm room and they hold their hair back with a pen behind their ear and they use it to write in a leather-bound journal about girls who smoke too much and have soft ***** so they can pick up more girls who smoke too much and have soft *****.

Guys with long hair are the metalheads who sit in the back of class and use their hair to distract from the fact that they're wearing poor-quality ironic headphones that project Alice in Chains to everyone within a four-desk radius but no one's going to say anything because hey, that guy's a creep.

Guys with long hair are the classical types that play expensive instruments and have beautiful eyes that you can't see very often and have to keep ponytail elastics on their wrists, their wrists that never stop moving, conducting, tapping, curling, because Chopin slows for no man, no matter how long his locks.

And if you poured all these guys with long hair in a test tube and melted them until the agendas broke and forged and changed colors, you'd have him.

I found him in a smoky sweet basement in a house where everyone belongs but no one should actually live. I braided his shoulder-brushing hair without asking and saw his smile like a chunk of snow the size of your high school falling off a mountain, fast and white, huge and more important than anything else around.

I found him again in a different basement where only musicians belong. He invited me into the closet with the piano and it's like he asked me to crawl inside his head and hang out for a while. He casually mentioned his favorite angry bands while his fingers brushed keys in an order they seemed to know on their own, tendons and strings.

He says things that deserve to be handwritten in leather-bound journals. He holds your wrist with one hand when you shake the other because people have become desensitized to handshakes and don't feel the human contact of it anymore. He hugs to the right because you're supposed to hug heart-to-heart.

*"People are going to judge based on what they see anyway. Might as well make sure they're right, sort of."

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.