You’ll outsmart death
With stygian ink on white
And conquer life
Through the iridescent glow
Of lamplight behind thin paper;
I’ll etch your pulse into syllables
And whittle your skin into careful articulations Wherein each letter is an elegy.
I’ll divide fragments of your existence
Into rhymes and rhythms
And through an artfully crafted diction,
You’ll become a lasting deity.
Your impressions will be left
To unborn eyes-
Untouched ears-
And unmapped tongues.
You will be contemplated
Into divergent wisps of articulation.
Your touch will linger on pages
And your love will persist in ink
-And you will live forever.

You know when you realize that you care about someone, like, a lot, and you know that they don’t care about you back? And you’re just like, “****”. And then you start contemplating the rationale for their disinterest and you look at yourself, because there must be something wrong there, right? Like,
“Are my jokes not funny?
Should I try to be more feminine?
Is my attractiveness crippling,
Or perhaps non-existent?”  
So many questions.
And you don’t want to seem desperate, either. You’re fine. He means as little to you as you do to him. You’ll find someone else, anyways: someone better than him. Someone who will make you feel like his body is a mold crafted especially to hold yours, like his was. Someone who can make you like the songs that you hate because he asks you to give them another listen, like he could. Someone whose casual words, bathing in syllables that sing just like melodies, sound like stolen stanzas from the works of Robert Frost, or T.S. Elliot, like his did.
You’ll find someone better, who will love you back.
Like he didn’t.
But what if you don’t?
Because as hard as you try to convince yourself otherwise, he’s got you wrapped around his finger like a pinky promise meant never to be forgotten and when he looks at you, you can’t explain the chemical imbalance in your brain that prompts your cheeks to blush like the burning embers in a dying fire and your stomach to fleet like a child on a trampoline. But when he entwined his hand with yours, he crossed his forefinger over his middle one and spoke to you in elaborate proposals that sounded like the word “beautiful” became something physical and your limerence was infallible. And, when he let go, he did it so quickly that he couldn’t feel the air around him burst in painful spurts as you groped it desperately for the broken pieces of yourself, and now he’s fine, but what are you supposed to do?
And, just like a moth drawn to a flame and Red Riding Hood to the woods and Icarus to the sun, you’ll never realize that your enticement is really just a very beautiful detriment, and you’ll spend the next number of endless days swearing to yourself that the way your skin burns feels just like magic.

Do not fall in love with an artist;
Her mind is both a framework
And a disarray
Of jumbled sentiments.
And once you embed yourself
Within her horizons,
She’ll fathom you into a masterpiece.
She’ll draw the way your lips form words
With mesmerizing hues
And bind your love
Into a collection of poetic utterances
And she’ll make an inconsequential language
Into an unconventional expression.
She’ll pluck strings
To embody the way your chest
Rises against her ear with each breath;
She’ll make you fall in love with creativity.
And one wrong move,
And you’ll become a masterwork in her array.

I picked up a penny and thought of luck:
And wondered if its existence rang true
Because if you bent down, you might get stuck.
I don’t think that’s lucky at all. Do you?

And what if the dime carried a disease?
And you got a bad rash on your face?
Well, that just doesn’t seem like luck to me.
So why would you risk it in the first place?

What if a rabbit’s foot hung off your chest?
You would reckon that your fortune was sweet.
But I don’t think a rabbit would feel blessed,
Wandering around without any feet.

So I think I’ll leave the penny untouched
And save it for those who do trust in luck

Some say that love is an ardent thing;
That its sentiments,
When elucidated by words
Or art
Or something physical,
Are afire in their altruisms, but I
Know love as something fading.
But it seems different with you.
I am over-zealous,
Unconvincing,
Perhaps unenticing,
But I will not lay,
Dismantled in my existence,
And let the gaps between my fingers
Be filled with air,
And they will wait to be inundated
By your gnarled hands.

And though your touch could
Set me afire in a most illustrious way,
*I will not open myself up this way again.

The fault of our reality is not written in our stars
And it will not dance across unfavorable constellations,
Or dissolve into inconsolable fragments.

The fault, my love, is not written in our stars.
It is written in ourselves.

But how fortunate would it be?
To cast the providence of our unlucky affairs
Into the gloomy twilight,
Where the sky is so unilluminated
That we could close our restful eyes
And fathom a world where it does not exist?

But the fault, my love, is not written in our stars.
It is written in ourselves.

We are heavily folded sheets of stationary:
A collection of utterances
Bound into melancholy novels
By our mangled hearts,
And though spoken words
Still fall onto my turning pages
As tears do fall from my reddened cheeks,
I have yet to forget
The chapter you have left unwritten,
Because an unwritten chapter is one to be adorned:
It cannot end
For it does not exist.
And so we fumble through an amorous affliction,
Fabricated into a bittersweet infinity.

And at midnight,
When my restless fingers
***** the empty air for you,
And the reality of our desolate fault
Seeps into my hands,
I wish you were here.

But the fault, my love, is not written in our stars.
It is written in ourselves.

j.s.

He cranes tiredly over folds of parchment
As sunlight falls across his ashen features
And the restless night becomes lost
Within a sea of fading maps and broken compasses.

Worn pencils collect on hardwood like dust,
And discarded errors in calculation fall into the corners.
He stumbles weakly between varying levels of consciousness,
And exhaustion claims an inch more of his body
With each exasperated flutter of his eyelids.

He spins the globe to his right with a lazy hand
And catches Africa with his finger
Wishing that he could’ve been anywhere but here
Because it is immeasurably heartbreaking
To have the entire world at your fingertips
And to have never seen any of it.

j.s.