I'm in love with someone's daughter
living in the shards of a broken home
Cutting herself on two year-old letters
These are moments she can't fake;
reasons to feel alone
So used to abuse, her tears start to shake
I hold her close as her head starts to ache
"I love you too much,
so I can't let your heart break."
She said, "I know you love me,
but you've made a mistake."

I never meant for anyone to be my pulse.
I promise not to step on your feet
if you teach me how to waltz.

sick in the mornings one thousand times more at night
cells tightening at
the God sized electric pain
coming quick through me like
those five forced breaths
I took them out one two three and on
when you looked out for you, & left me
left my
lungs forced open to contract the corners of
sharp colossal wide open night
left me alone in the middle of the road
when it was coldest in the end of december,

the two yellow dividing lines following you out into the dark
stabs of iced oxygen pricking deep where my fingers could
not pry

like that
this pain comes all of it at once
bright black vision of in-utterable clarity
each wave counted out by the swell
the judgement wrath of Chaos
black and silent breaking unbearable down onto my head
but somehow, becomes even more, even higher and still darker
breaking through the very form of the vast!

the rest is more than I can speak
what it was
drifted from the glimmer
pale and in form unlike the forms we’d seen before or conceived
approached where I lay bleeding into the ground,
barely more than a pile of wasted light against little shadows

“go on,
it will get darker yet
do not falter now.
go back to the earth
burn out until you are nothing left
but the bones of your bones,
and can no longer weep.
know beyond the horror and the wonder and the nothing
what you are
only whispered beloved

know it through to the end, where the dark softly turns into something else
further still, to an autumn of final ending, there
throw off your clothes, go as you came
go out into the water
drift from there, away and lost now always
look up blessed through the last evening
do not stop until you are truly gone.”

Though the Summer sun
No longer muffles its rays
With trees, but is full with
Daytime,
I will let you sleep.

Though the cat is playing
With your feet under the
Cover to annoy them into the
Kitchen,
I will let you sleep,  

And feed her myself.
I'll keep the news on low;
Only be whispered to of the
Deaths and tragedies we've
Slept through.

And if my every dream as of
Lately has been true; that
You miss the freedom of an empty
Bed when I'm there;
The room for another it creates,

I will let you sleep.
I will close every door of the house
Between us, hide my pain
In my hands and feel it run
Like the last of our sand between
My fingers.

I will not wake you up with
A single sigh, snuffle or drop of
Tear on this floor that
We walked in our days of love.
I will suffer for us alone.
And let you sleep.

A strand of your hair
On the table.

I pick it up gently
In grace; gently in love still,

And place it in the bin.
If ever we end,

Let us end it
Like that.

sometimes you come back,
like the peculiar awareness of finitude
soft footed
after we’d been in that small room together
cold
pouring out in white light
leaning over and smiling gently
with a surety of falling snow winter outside
and you described seattle and kurt cobain
and showed me your jars of sand and jars of honey
and I smiled gently and loved you.
and we went out in the cold and you smoked a cigarette
and everything around us was hushed wet in dark gray
you were something that made me ache
honest human, dark and earnest
opened ahead of me
wise and naive
I felt like I’d known you somewhere before
I held you in my vision but didn’t speak

as you told me what men had done to you
I picked up something that was shining on the ground
and thought about what men had done to me