Lying on my stomach I remember the way your fingers felt unbuttoning my flesh.
The way your teeth left cursive along my spine
Beckoning me to open like a book that you were never allowed to read.
I will unfold for you with the promise that you will only sign your name in blood
Along the edge of my sanity and only if you take me out of my mind.
I am not looking to lay anywhere except six feet under
Where I can feel your fire without fear of burning myself with your flame.
So I beg you-
Cover me in gasoline
Strike me where you please
And leave your sigil in my ashes.

My life is a work of art
But it has never been scripted for you.
It doesn’t have to taste sweet on your tongue.
It doesn’t have to be soft or comfortable.
You do not even have to enjoy it.
No.
My life is not for you to consume numbly.
It is not meant to be a safe space for you to form opinions.
I am still carving out the obsidian I’m crafted from.
And I do not have to listen to you to know where to chisel.
I have never written for you. Or loved for you.
With you maybe, but not for.
My life is not meant to be eaten like an apple
Whose core is too harsh.
I am poison.
And I never told you to taste me.

You came to me in a dream once, with crystal covered mountains dripping with nostalgia.
Ice cream on your tongue tasted sweeter than you ever did. You apologized for that too.
I have carved a path from the ice to trek for days that felt heavier when there was no one to miss- no distraction from the shell that I have worn that has formed from the inside out.
I think I am softer, more tender, more loving than perhaps I actually am.
I am the rigid shell of a soul who is too scared to feel everything that should be felt and now I am left to wander in snowy banks with the boots you lent me that never fit.

Come kiss me.

I will put away my teeth for you.

I will find the softest part of my skin and let you touch it.

I will not be hard or walled up.

I am spinning around myself and talking in foreign tongues.

So I can find a way to tell you-

I am hurting but I am still enough.

I think my heart may rip out of my chest.
Today I woke up feeling like I was still asleep. I don't think I washed the dreams off my skin.
I am typing with a bandaged finger, a testament to my carelessness.
I don't know how to guard the things that matter most. I am casual. I am not careful enough.
I don't know how to hold onto things before they change.
I am a human wearing a chameleons skin but I am not predisposed to adaptation.

I am waiting for you.
Under the Full Moon clouded, and silent. I hear nothing but the summer night.
I, I have never met a storm that strikes as quietly as you- unsure of whether to leave with the breeze or hit like your eyes have been waiting and casting their gaze on me.
You tiptoe around the cracks and creaks and bends of my rivers and I wonder if there will be anything that is uprooted from your embrace.
Deadly is the night but I have seen her long before you arrived. I am worried that I will not feel the warmth of the rain in June.
The only rain I want to feel is you.

All I want for dinner is you.
To taste leftover Chinese food on your tongue.
I have always been easily amused- but you- you not so much.
So I will wrap you delicately and consume you inch by inch.
You will taste like coffee and lavender lemonade. Like 2am French fries and insomnia.
Your flesh will feel like tired limbs and early mornings. Like hesitant kisses and Full Moons.
You will be warm. Warmer than me- so warm I may melt.