im pinching at my skin
trying to grab away at all
the surface area you have traversed

pulling at my neck trying
to rip off the marks
from your warmth and comfort

biting at my own lip
in attempts to rid
them of the love you made

my heart is aching for you

fortunately my body parts
are the only piece of me
that is still physically touched
by you

they say skin tapers away
and a new layer can form
over itself

coincidentally i am hoping
to still be able to feel
you every blue moon

but where is the new layer for my heart

to cover the scars
and salvage anything that may
be left

where is the fix for that

The forbidden fruit is the most desired;
we want what cannot be obtained.
The scarcity principle is to be admired;
The lengths we go to to have our perceived freedoms maintained.

Unfortunately for me, the opposite is also true...
Once one is "too available", said desire crumbles.
From prior experiences, this is the knowledge I drew,
until all that's left is feigned apologetic mumbles.

We often drive away those we love most,
to settle for those we see to be "good enough".
To those who always seem inferior, here is my toast:
You will eventually meet someone who can appreciate your love.

I love you too much
That I can hate you
That I can cry about you
That I can worry about you
You're too much to handle
But the one I love most

She Doesn't know how I feel about her,
Her smile, her laugh, her eyes
it all blows me away
When I look at her,
it leaves me in awe on how one human being,
can be so mesmerizing
taking me and engulfing me
into a moment of beauty and wonder

She Doesn't know I sneek peeks at her
just to see her bright smile,
She Doesn’t know I adore her
from the way she crinkles her nose
to the way she laughs at stupid little things
She Doesn't know I thank god for her presence every day
because every little thing she does brightens up my day
She Doesn't know she's part of the reason I enjoy life so much
She Doesn't know I think about her when i'm alone and gloomy
She Doesn’t know the reason behind my smile,
when I look at her
She Doesn't know I constantly sit and think
aspiring to find
someone as amazing as her to call my own
She Doesn’t know how i feel about her,


…….simply because I can't find a way to tell her

i am thirteen years old and i think love is a hand
because that was the first thing that made me feel good
and i think love is supposed to feel good so
love is the hand of a boy four years my senior and
love is a hand that holds a joint and
between puffs of marijuana smoke touches my face
before telling me i’m beautiful
and makes promises to call on the weekends while he’s
away at school
but i’m only thinking of whether or not i
made ninth grade honors english
and he tells me he hates his parents
for expecting him to go to medical school
after college
and for expecting him to become successful and
for expecting him to have money
and a family
and a white picket fence
and i wonder what it would be like for parents
to expect anything from me other than
to stop slicing at my skin and to please finish what’s on my plate
at dinner
but when he asks what i’m thinking about
i just tell him
“love is a hand”
and he looks at me funny with squinted eyes
and i know that his mother does not cry at night
trying to hide bruises from her daughters that already know
that love leaves burn marks on your skin
when love is a hand.

now i’m sixteen and
love is a hand
that shoots up when it sees me
in the hallway between fourth and fifth period and
i’m not one for hugs but when love is a hand
i’ll take two around my waist
to lift me until i yell to let me down, let me down
leaving my cheeks burning red
and flushed from embarrassment
because love is a hand that has never touched me
between my legs and *****
and love is a hand twice the size of my own
that dialed my phone number to tell me
“i asked her to be my girlfriend and she said yes”

i am seventeen and my skin has burned
from staying in the sun for too long
when we went to the beach in the middle of august
and played thumb wars for hours but
you always won because your love was a hand that
was much bigger than mine
and after you kissed me you told me about her.
you always left your windows open, allowing my skin
to freckle and for the sun to leave his
hand prints across my face because you were too
scared of how i’d be if you had left your own

so now i’m 18
and i’m crying
in the mirror because i can’t make out my memories
and i can’t tell which hand print belongs to you
so i cry until i can’t cry anymore and my mother comes into
the bathroom and looks at me in the mirror
and rests her hand on my shoulder
and silently says “i love you”
the way you always did on mornings over my stomach with
your love that was the last hand that burned my skin
on that tuesday night when we watched the ****** suicides
when you told me there was someone else
that there had always been someone else
and that i was the other.
and your hands went frozen and numb and stung
with frost bite to ease the burn that you had left across my belly.

now i’m nineteen and all the boys are the same
they all bite their fingernails
because they’re trying not to love so they chew and they gnaw
until their fingernails are bitten down and bleedy
and your love is a hand that slapped me across the face
because you didn’t have the nails to scratch.
i should have seen it coming when i saw you
bit your fingernails
or when i saw you didn’t touch me except
between my legs and
*****
or when you got burns on your fingers from joints of marijuana
just like my shoulder blades in the sun
and when you got paper cuts all over your palms from
looking at photographs of people that you hate
and i can see that your love was never for me
because i could not love your hands.
and love is a hand.

now i’m 20 and my hands are cold
because in the winter they hide in mittens
hoping that the heat might burn them just a little bit
but it never does
and my love is just a hand,
hiding in a mitten hoping to be lit on fire.

i'm beginning to wonder if i'm making these things up in my head
from boredom or maybe because i was socially misinformed on the
ways that one responds to advances and putting i in you and yours
did nothing other than let me know that i'm a fool, my god, every
memory i tried hard and fast to forget comes to surface, and it hurts
but more than anything it makes me wonder when the **** i'll learn
the lesson you and yours have been trying to teach me all this time.

it's more than just banter and it's far more than just the loneliness on
both our ends, it's all in trying to fill the voids that were left by the
coldest of weather and the memories of our ears bleeding when we
didn't know the time or day or place but we knew that it's not supposed
to feel like this, as least that's what mom always said - no, no it's not,
but i think i’ve come to terms and i think you’ve been forgiven but i
don’t know quite yet so don’t hold me to that for i’d hate to turn into.

i was chugging a beer the first time i tried to forgive you but freud has
a name for that, i think, even though freud is an idiot who says that one
day i'll find someone just like you and fall in love with the emptiness
of the promise for the void that you left to be filled but everything is as
hollow as the straw i sip my *** through, ***'s my only connection to
you and it's the only thing that i remember you being so committed to
and the only promise that you ever made was to ***, every night, until
every other promise you made was forgotten because you fulfilled the
only one that mattered in the way you and yours could never do for i.

We slipped into the same cold
March, forgetting each other less
than a mile away, shifting
life from death:
some sobbing blue, some receiving sun.

You took lemon and salt
to salmon, oil and a cube of sugar
to dry skin.
I wear hats on bad hair days
and don't drink enough water.

Did you know all our spoons were wiped clean
from our kitchen
in a blistering July?
I can hear God's small voice
in a rare fantasy
before I realize it's your favorite
show on the television set
in the living room thirty feet away.

The calendar's propeller
brought us to December.
Iris petals are tucked
into journals. All the cable lines are down.
The lemon trees,
uprooted.

And, just like that,
summer,fell into fall
Pretty leaves and crisp air,
Pumpkins and  sweater weather
October is my favorite color.