If I'm your closest friend
Then you deserve someone else
Someone who won't fall in love
When there's no love to be had
I'm sorry

I want to get tattooed someday
Maybe it's masochism
Maybe it's self love
Covering up my scars or
Painting on my body
Showing myself that I am something that can be beautiful
Skin is canvas
In the sense that it weathers
Changes over time
Bears the cloth of the owner's actions
But it is not canvas
It does not exist solely to be impressed upon
Skin holds the soul
Binds together our flesh and bones
So what if I paint it
Blue and black and bleeding red
A pattern of roses across my chest
It's just another tale
Another consequence of my actions
Stitched into my physicality
Like freckles and moles and stretch marks
If it helps me love myself, then what's the point?

You haven't moved
in several minutes,
a perfect model,
as if it were your goal.
The sun filters through
gauze and lace,
the peculiar mid-morning
light that muscles its way
across the wall
in grasping splashes.
Your tea is steaming
in its high-waisted glass,
& I hear half-sounds
escaping from your room.
I am the reporter
of your brown eye,
writing this moment
to you even though
it's already gone.

Night sits on my chest
Squeezes poems out of me
And grinds my poor soul

im sick
blown full of holes then
congested
heat and cold
are my sun and moon
the night and day
a switch flippedv within seconds
the whole nine yards\
but the only yards of mine
are the tendrils of sickness
laid out like racetrack down my tongue
into my inner systems

The last day I saw you, it was snowing
It was snowing in the middle of March,
which was weird
But even weirder, I was sitting at your table
The cool kid's table
All of your friends looked at me like I was a freak of nature
But I was your freak
They saw us laughing and cracking jokes,
but mostly staying silent
and they left us alone

I wonder if I'll ever forget that day
I've already forgotten the way you dressed
or whether or not you were wearing your glasses
But I remember the snow,
cold and silent as us
Falling down outside
It was still there when I woke up at three o'clock in the morning
to your breathing
To the fact that you were still laying next to me

I remember now,
your red and black sweater
I never got why people call those things sweaters
I always called them sweatshirts, or pullovers
But you'd assuredly call it a sweater
Just like I know you'd always baby talk your dogs
and chase after Emmett in your backyard
and dream of smoking ****
in your unattached garage
I'll never know why you picked me
Why you chose to stick around
When you could've easily left
Maybe it was my perseverance,
If you could call it that
I could never let you get away
I never wanted you away from me

Maybe I'll forget this all someday
When I'm older and greyer
But not quite grey
Living with the one I called my soulmate
The person I chose to believe
was meant for me
Funny, how I still keep thinking about that person as you
when the conversation never flows quite right
how we can't be left alone together
in an empty room
There'd be no fear of passion
We are as lifeless as fallen stilts
The abandoned remnants of some government project
But for now I'll say that I'll always think of you
And I will think of you
Your hair and your stupid smile
Everchanging but always signaturely you
I guess I'll miss the few moments where I felt at home with you
at peace with you
Because after this quarantine is over,
nothing will be the same