What love has died inside you,
Shriveled at the thought of me?

What silence do you send me
In lieu of compromise?

She is always looking behind her
To see what she's dropped
Out of fear,

I do the same
Out of curiosity.

We've smashed against one another,
Desperate to connect but unaware
There was a simpler answer
To our misconceptions

If I had a better memory
I would let those conversations lull me to sleep
And play that vocabulary in my mind like
A handwritten song
And there are a lot of things that make up a human mind
Components that reach all the way down into your ribcage
Through trembling hands and empty stomaches
But I intend to feel them all
One time,
A long time ago,
Someone used the word "frightening"
To describe the uncertainty
And burden
That comes with having complex emotions
That word is used as a scapegoat
To expunge yourself of the shadow of vulnerability
It takes hours to reach the tips of my fingers
With everything I feel
And maybe I write so much
Because I never remember exactly what people say
Or maybe it's because
I would like to remember it through rose tinted glasses
Either way
It stretches across miles
And I would use that scapegoat word
To describe what it feels like to be vulnerable
When you realize all of these pretend walls you've put in place
Can be destroyed with the right knock
And I think poetry
Isn't about that frightening feeling
It is about
Feeling it
Being frightened
Having emotion
And continuing
Where others would not

On the day you left me
The wine hit my chest
As soon as I woke.

The skies opened up and wept

How fitting

You were the water
   I needed to quench my thirst
   When the desert inside me was too cruel
You are the water
   Found overflowing in my lungs
   Collapsing my breathing, ending my life

Well,

I'm a bastion of something, to someone, I guess,
I just can't understand it.

I explain things all the time
To people with half-minded hearts and half-hearted minds,
Who might mean well but are conditioned
To think of nothing but themselves.

And yet I see myself in other people?

I'm a mercenary for a god I'm just inventing
And nobody will follow me, not yet
Because they're waiting out the seasons.

I'm a different person in a different body at the beginning of each new day,
I can't repeat myself.

I say nothing to my reflection as I morph,
Consistency wasn't a gift handed to me
(Much less, taught).

I'm a caricature of someone,
But yet, I don't know who.

So but what gender are you?

I don't know, the answers to that question hide behind a door that's closed and I can't seem to get it un-stuck.

So please,
Do not come up to me on the street and ask me if I give a ****, because I don't

My soul cannot be owned or bought
And in order to understand me, you need to forget all the binary lessons you've been taught.

So, but what gender are you?
Why don't you come up here and define me? Please, take a shot

Put this nervous, wandering soul back where it belongs - in a box