I think I loved you most the winter your heating was broken
And we’d stay inside all morning
Pretending to complain that we couldn’t get out of bed
Our clothes becoming little islands on the floor,
Ones that we could not quite find the courage to visit

Your hand stayed glued to my hip,
Your breath warming my shoulder
Like a long drag of whiskey
That kind that had a home so far away,
In a glass bottle on top of your refrigerator.
The one that would not be opened
Until that fateful day in February,
When everything went wrong

And on that unbearable night
When you joked that you’d freeze to death if I left you
There was a long silence
Like it might be true.

Now it’s warm enough
That I show too much skin when sitting in bars
And you avoid me like the plague,
Whispering in any girl’s ear that’s near to you
Every time you see me watching out of the corner of your eye

We should have stayed inside when the ice began to melt
Because I think
When those doors opened and we finally ventured outside
The world had changed,
And so had you and I.

December came and went
without notice of your departure.

but when January rolled around and fruit cake and sparkling lights no longer littered my home, it felt empty and i remembered how full and intense your presence was and how i longed for what we almost,
but never fully, had.

Love and life confuse me
Ive been trying to find the answers
Dangling on the edge of inner security
But thoughts take over like a cancer
And love blinds us, can't you see?
In time, with treatment, it does get better
Until then I will stop with the inquiry.

i want to tell you about lost poems.
about how the scars on my neck
used to tell stories of an angel
singing into my skin and every
time they burn i feel myself dying
in her arms all over again.
i want to tell you about the
endless pages and colored notes
and backs of cigarette packs i
wrote her name on, and how each one of them
ended up in my bruised fingertips
clutching her waist.
i want to tell you about the time
she set my lungs on fire with her
snow cold skin; how she blew
stardust into my nostrils and i
spiraled into dark addiction.
i want to tell you how i craved her
beauty like a dead man craved the oxygen that
once flowed through his veins-
i'll tell you how i crave her still.
i want to tell you about lost
poems, how they never really
come back to you. how all you
can do is sit on the floor and write about them
until there's nothing left but
dried ink and a hollow ache in the
parts she kissed you most.
she is my lost poem.

being a poet is not
sentimental. it’s not
pretty. there’s nothing romantic about diving off a
bridge just to hear the water reverberate the sound of your ex lover’s
name. rain sounds like nothing but
falling blood and you’re always angry that it ruins your
shoes but is never enough to really
**** you. being a poet is a degenerative
brain disease, i heard
once. there’s some things doctors can’t
fix. there’s other things doctors can’t
name. all medicine starts to sound like it’s named after
a god. words never say what you actually
mean. you’re bleeding stanzas at the
mouth and everyone files past
you like you’re a waste of
time. when people tell you you say pretty
words you erupt like the earthquake in los
angeles this morning because the words might sound
pretty but what you’re saying
isn’t. everything weighs so *******
heavy on your shoulders and you hold the names of your ex
lovers names on your
tongue until they melt into
blood. i don’t know where your
hands are, nobody
does. the wolves are the only things that even have a
hint of what your thriving heart is shouting. you’re bound to feel too
much and at the funeral service of a man you’ve never
met you’re going to be crying in the
corner while everyone wonders who you
are and why you even
care. your words save so many lives but they’re bound to miss a
few, especially
yours.

I determine to die loved.
Even if it is only
by myself.