Somehow they made us places.
You were a king’s vacation home
and I was everyone else’s waiting room.
They made you something for the best  
and I got the ones stalling someone for better.

I want to know the first person to fall in love.
I want to tell them of you and I,
and what happened to you and I,
then maybe I can be the first one to break a heart.

“There’s 7 billion, 46 million people on the planet and most of us have the audacity to think we matter” –George Watsky  

Dear George,  
You were there for everyone else. I cried for them all while my dad begged you in whispers,
and you melted into the crowds of people,
and you dove from the balconies,
and pretended like the world consisted of somebodies.
You left me with cold copies and ignorant earth.  
Somehow you made 4am into something selfish.
I was losing lessons I was willing to learn. I had no songs to sing,
while you were serenading the ****,
and were packing his bags, and became his love letters for her,
and you made me lose someone I never had.

You wrapped every lesson I ever needed up in an empty inbox.    
You painted San Fran diamond sidewalks empty gold,and I needed you!
You were there for the mutilated, and kissed their filthy trigger fingers, and spat on birthday wishes, and you made me desire the life of a passenger.
You were the only one that reminded me how to smile; you drowned out slamming doors…  
You didn’t have to make the water thicker or make the bottom seem so far.
You didn’t have to give them boats of Titanic shards!
Your silence  made sinking inevitable.  

You gave me more with empty hands than I ever would have thought.  You taught me that every hero dies,
and that I will always love the traitors,
never love cardboard cutouts, or dream of cardboard castles.
You showed me how it feels grasping at ghosts,
and how much you can doubt,and just how much that hurts.  
I hope you never write your idols.  

With Love,  
The Girl That Will Never Learn

I want a lot of things, like shirts of him.
A drape of cotton haze, a bandage for
the nights you spend beneath blue sheets, a swim  
instead asleep. A shred of what’s no more.  

I want my life to be a movie scene.
We drive across the Golden Gate, the bright
and trembling lights like camera’s flash. You lean
against the window, saying you’re alright.

But nothing’s ever good or great or fine.
The shirt is not the same as him. The car
is short a person that’s cuddling coffins in wine
Imbibing soil. I’m saving scabs from scar.

I want another look in electric eyes
and pain to have no place in last goodbyes .

Scene 1: A Night with the Time-Bomb
We sleep under paint and plaster: impressionist probably.
I slaughter my feelings in my throat.
My heart sends telegraphs instead of beating,
but you prefer the silence.

I hate that I could never enjoy this.
I hate that they all love the stars.
The only difference between us and them is where we’re burning.
The only difference between you and I is who we are mourning.
I never thought it would be me.

For you I tear loopholes in my morality
And find suffering in getting everything I ever wanted.
I pick at the plaster,
wake me up when it’s over.

Scene 2: Lunch with the Comedic Relief

I greet you with defense of my mistakes,
justifying the difference of these dog days,
comparing a grenade to a grenade.
Meanwhile the real contrast is in now and who we used to be.

You’re not laughing anymore.
I haven’t been the punch-line in weeks,
It kills you to look at me,
And when you do I hate what I see.

It’s all a waste of good material.
Cue the canned laughter and suddenly it is sloppy sit-com.

Scene 3: After School Specials with the Stereotype

You run to me: lanky.
You yell my name: cracking.
You’re my dollar store Halloween.

You’re the only reason I’ll go anywhere today.
You laugh: choppy.
You read from the usual script,
I say my lines from the in-between.
You’re the only reason I’ll feel genuine today.

We’re screaming at traitors in voicemail.
Strangers dive in the unholy waters.
I feel how I should have all along,
and I fear this perfection is solitary.

Scene 4: Piloting a Corpse

I lay in bed listening to the endings.
I measure the distance between me, everyone and everything.
They love all of me, including my worst enemy.
They take the ugly and wait for the beauty.
I take this desolation and try to dazzle;
I ignite like sulfur.

I fall deeper into my temporary bed,
of my temporary house.
Tomorrow I’ll tell you how everything changes,
Tomorrow someone might form a complete thought.
Tomorrow I’ll tell them all how I feel.
Tomorrow I’ll give up after “I love you”.
Tomorrow I’ll try to glow like neon.

You are the smoky breath of a liar,
the paper in which he is licked and twisted,
and the only betrayal he will ever know.

Could you taste ashes
in the mouth of the other man?
Could you find satisfaction
in the burns of the other woman?

Your eyes are the black and blue bruises of night.
You are loud like broken glass,
quiet like the cracks,
and never saw sympathy in thread fuses.

You are a woman of fire
and love only those with gunpowder hearts.

Our bare feet danced on rocky grins
and we sculpted the mountains with footprints
until we became the poster children of lost causes.

God glared at our river through cloudy fingers.
They stuck paddles in his eyes
and sent ripples through heaven’s image.

There were skeletal faces in the bluffs,
an unsettling stillness in the trees
and a lethal sense of freedom about us.

Our hazy days brought darker nights
and we ran deeper into wooded revolution
until we became the monsters of a hand-me-down fear.

Natives watch us from the water
with all the same forgiveness of a wanderer,
but knew us with the bitterness of the choice they never had to make.
We saw them as the lucky ones.

We saved ourselves from the white picket daggers
that came with delusions of all-American purity.
You loved me enough to break a little girl’s white dress dreams.

Now we live in the dark chills of runaway fantasies
where thrill turns standing hair into pine needles,
and we cloak our paranoia in smiles.

You and I are inhabitants of an untamed Washington.
We’ll die out here in golden fields by the water,
without ever fearing what we know we should.
I became human under trees and sky,
and I swear I will never go back to the smoking houses.

For the first time I couldn't see ***** water under our shining city lights.
I kissed you in the site of where I made my first great mistake
and found that nothing ever changes. How did you make me forget
those seven months without you?  

For the first time in a long time, you spoke to me without her
in the back of your throat. You made me seek comfort in the frigid grass
where our friends once stood.

For the first time I wanted to remember you in the dark
formations of frostbite. Your love is the pink, needle stabbed skin of hypothermia and I will never forgive myself for wanting to freeze.

For the first time in a long time, I thought I had truly won
since you showed me the pain of losing. I let you feed me three word lies
in cold smoke and twirl me across the concrete. I let you try
and cushion the blow of broken bones. Failure, I’m sure,
you never saw in splattered marrow.

This was the last time you let me love you and this is all that’s left of it.
I swear this is the last of it.