You were the only person who
could ever come close to
bringing me to tears.

Then, one day
You did.

I just want someone to write with.
No.
On.

I want someone who will stay up all night long, nothing but our souls and pens on display for the moonlight to catch off the small of his back, while the ink spills across our skin and forms itself into the lyrics to a song that doesn’t quite know how it goes. Not yet. I want a symphony of rhyme and reason and metaphors and anaphoras and allusions and oxymorons, I want poetry. In the form of a man.

This is a story about you.

The bottoms of my broken, blistered feet blazed a ballroom dance across dashed dreams and spiteful strings of words better left unsaid.

It’s strange, the things I let myself do.
While I, surrounded in filth, am thinking of you.
You twist my words behind my back
They write themselves into a poem
That lacks a steady rhyme scheme.
Sure.
My poetry has stopped being beautiful.
But it’s started to have meaning.
The man you are,
The man I want,
Should not want me.

My lungs are filled with more nicotine

than the average 90 year old pack a day smoker, you see

smoking runs in my family.

And if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that all it takes is a spark,

a spark that always has the best of intentions

a spark that always was meant to help

a spark that’s always to catch a glimpse of the unknown in the dark

and then there’s a flame and an ember and the soft, hollow wheeze of

smoke.

Entering my newborn lungs because of your newborn stress born out of your

newborn wedding dress.

You just wanted to make sure you looked good.

And you should.

But now my lungs are filled with the toxins of

broken hearts taped back together

tragic love stories, more than I can remember

of men, come and gone,

And more men come along,

one’s who like new kinds of smoke

the kind that involve words like

****.

stem.

****.

****.

***.

Or how about illegal?

How about enfeebling an infant to make sure you can pay rent

because you’ve spent every cent of his

child support from your

******

sticky

divorce on

***.

****.

****.

A habit that’s taken over for too long and it’s only a matter of time before I’m…

gone.

Because every time I open my lips to breath. To dispell the smoke, the poison, to exhale, to express, my lips are sown shut with your tapping cigarrete

and gossipping nicotine

and looping heart-broken scene I’ve seen more time’s than I can count

And if this is what you’re about,

Always needing a spark

A flame

A ****

A ****.

Or any other addiction that will never last quite long

Enough, I’ve had enough.

There’s a window to fresh air that I now know you’ll never help me reach

but once I get there my lungs will sing gospels of

Love that stays.

Of drug free days.

Of a mother’s loving embrace that doesn’t involve a wheezing spark.

She has a tattoo on her left forearm. She gave it to herself when she was fifteen, with a pen and a needle in the back of her room…

                And I’d always thought that was pretty cool. It was just a little line, like a “z” or the trail of a honey bee, something from deep within a mind flowing with twisted fantasy, but I could never see that it was a “two”. Because we, the children of Ignorance and Bliss, are number two. And you, my dear friend, are number one, in both our minds and yours. So we lock ourselves behind closed doors and waste away doing chores that were yours, and lore of cut wrists or an air-tight noose for the gender I kiss is so cliché that you, in all your self-love and knowing when and how to turn push into shove, somehow missed that my wrists are scar free, and I love my sexuality, and my sole insecurity is that I am number two. To both me and you. And it doesn’t matter if you lead with your left or your right, if you flee or you fight, if you’re gay, straight, or bi, you’re a butterfly in my eyes, the thousand-mirrored eyes of a simple housefly that can’t even see the sky in which you preside through this opaquely glass ceiling…

                And that window of opportunity looks rather appealing, but I have this feeling it’s only reserved for those with pretty, powerful, or popular wings… and I am none of those things.

                And for once, I see that my story may never be quite as uplifting as I’d like to make it seem, because I’m quite keen to the fact that Act III will always end in tragedy. And those aren’t things I like to say, but to this day I pray that this grotesque display of shimmering wings and beautiful things would simply go away so I could say that a tattoo of the number two is something I will never do, but until that happens the concept rings true. Yet I’m told my wrists aren’t fit for a single number or slit.

                I have a long fuse, but it’s already been lit, so the next time you see fit to shoot ***** of spit or permit your self-love to turn push into shove, it may be my blood and ink that pools in the sink, mixing with my salty tears I’ve held through literally years of no self-love and knowing that the dove is you.

                And I am number two.

I miss you. I can’t read a single poem without thinking about you. I hate how we weren’t closer, how the distance grew toward the end. I hate that I’ll have to live with that regret. I hate how you never wrote me a love poem, simply because our love wasn’t timed with your poetry phase. I hate that I call it love, I hate that that’s what it was. I hate that I still kind of love you. I love you, I guess. I’m pretty sure I love you. Maybe I love you…

I love you.

I love the way you’ve put pen to paper from the day you were born, and I love that you’ll never stop. I love that you’re a worrisome, careful person, I love how hard you try to be mature but at the same time refuse to ****** the child inside you, something most of society views as an unavoidable rite of passage. I love that you’re free. I love that you dream, that you believe, I love that you don’t quite realize how your potential is more beautiful and has more breadth than the entirety of those cosmos you admire oh so much. I love how you fear you’re stuck in the past when you’ve evolved more in one teenage lifetime than most do in one adult lifetime. I love that you’re just a little bit crazy. I love how you drive me just a little bit crazy. I love how everything you are, your passions, your personality, every little trivial trait, desirable or otherwise, rubbed off on me in the most subtle ways.

I'm sorry.