i want you to be here when
i’m no longer soft and beautiful.
i want you to stay for when
my voice slips out of itself
and into another, when the crescent moons
of my body turn stubborn and rigid
and my chest is gutted, stitched, sculpted
like marble like artwork like a chiseled
gravestone reading “here lies your golden girl,
basked in till her light changed hues.”
stay until all my cells have been replaced
and i look at you with different eyes,
hold you with different arms.
this body is changing for my today
but staying for your tomorrow.

You say that people can never really love someone.
That we are not capable of giving away all of our attention and affection to someone else.
I say that you are a liar

I have loved you since the day I laid eyes on you.
And trust me, I love everything about you.
The way you look so confused when you don't know what I'm talking about.
The way you song, even though you clearly can't.
I love that you remember the tiny little things that I don't.
I'm sorry for that.

I would gladly give you all of my own being if you asked for it.
Or even if you didn't!
I pray that I know you as well as I think I do.
You are more than a friend to me.

When it rains, and there's lightning, I remember to not go outside because you said I would be electrocuted.
Even my memory is dedicated to you.

You are written in the bruises on my skin.
I have given you my skin
The worst of my insecurities.
What more can you ask for?

Or rather, don't ask.

I will wrap up my fears, loves, dreams, insecurities, and longings in a simple brown box and give them to you.
They were yours anyway.

So if that isn't love, if giving yourself completely to another person, isn't what you think love is, then I have nothing else to give.

But if I did, if I did, trust when I say that they are yours.

I never understood
The idea of love
How you could be so invested in each other
So persistent to one another

Then I met you.

a.s.

'I'm no poet.
Just an unfinished verse.'

and he replied,

'I believe you are both.
A poet
and a poem.'

Hurry,
Fall in love with me
while my eyes are sealed in dreams,
my defenses shackled in sheets
I have thrashed to the floor.
Fall in love with me
in my fraility,
while my bones are weak
from rattling,
before I shove your
ship from the shore
and scurry to the mountain tops,
shadowed by lingering
'almost's.
I sing no more.

And what an awful feeling it is
to be homesick
In your own home.

I swear I've tried to dance the sadness away but now I find myself tr ippi n g,
f a l
       l i n
              g, blades caressing my jaundiced skin, flames licking at
         my throat. Catching breath on
    pistol shots.
The ballerina slows her dance in my veins.