what a shame to think that the world
might end in only eight days' time
and i have never kissed
you except in
dreaming

you will think too much when you are kissing the girl down the hall.

you will dance with her, half-drunk and half-joking, and something foreign in you will ignite. you will blatantly ask her to be your girlfriend just to gauge her reaction. you will curiously perch yourself on her lap and beam when she praises your vocabulary. you are more drunk but you are still half-joking.

you will think of the way she runs her hands through your hair and over your shoulders. you will remember how she feels about touching things, how she only touches what is important to her, what she doesn't want to forget. you will think about this when she asks if she can kiss you. you will think about this when her dry, drunken lips find yours and you will think about it when the pad of her thumb grazes the waistband of your jeans. you will think about how your jeans look, pooled on her carpet.

you will think about the time she told you how fluently she reads body language, how people's feet point to what they want. you will step on your own toes in protest every time you see her in the cafeteria. you will think about the time she laughs and says, "god, you're so submissive, it's adorable" and you will think about how naked she makes your clumsy body feel, no matter what you're wearing, like each flippant comment peels back another layer of skin and muscle and tendon and bone until there is nothing left of you but her whispers, evaporating into the november air.

you will think about how she makes you feel like a bad metaphor. like the fluffy rhyme schemes that she bemoans.

you will worry about her panic attacks. you will want to remind her to breathe. you want to make her chase you but you worry about her shin splints.

you will think about the song you'd told her you wanted to lose your virginity to. you will think of how she scrolls through her music library methodically until she finds it and kisses your neck for four minutes and fifty seconds so you can sing along.

you will think of her words. you will wonder if she writes about you. you will wonder how she would feel if she knew you write about her. you will grieve how miserably your feeble musings stack up to her well-timed, self-aware prose and you will draw parallels between this and the rest of her and how everything she says is profound and every gesture is intentional and how small and stupid she makes you feel, and you are gasping into the darkness beyond her ears, whimpering under her mouth, shivering under her quilt.

you will think about the hand she stretches precariously over her shoulder to you just before she is sleeping beside you. you will think about her fingertips. you will think about her hair.

your thoughts will be clouds of her cigarette smoke.

why are you afraid?
are you scared to find my broken parts
scared to ***** your jealous fingers on my jagged face

are you running away from the damage you've done
are you afraid to face what you've done to me?
too frightened to see how thouroughly you've shattered me?

or are you afraid i'll break you in return?

you cannot trace the path of your destruction without falling
and i will not stop running to help you up

tonight i have a broken heart and i will deal with it as best i can
i should deal with the essay i have left to write
but i have until midnight tomorrow
i should do my dealing with a cup of tea, but my mother is asleep and the tea kettle would whistle her awake
i have homework and responsibility but tonight  i have a broken heart and i will deal with it as best i can
i have half a candy bar and volumes of bob dylan and tonight i deal with my broken heart
and if you call i will not answer.
and if you call i will not answer.

i have kissed too many girls, who,
between leaded lashes
and bloodied lips, begged me not
to fall in love with them

you smile
and it is then that i realize that you will be what kills me

not cancer
or car wreck
or nuclear winter

you
green eyes and patchwork smiles, knobby wrists and good intentions
you will **** me.

i spend the next three months writing my eulogy.

last i dreamed that you were a renaissance portrait. you were hanging under a fluorescent light in the museum.
a small red sign told me i couldn't touch you. your cheeks were glossed with gold dust and your lips curled delicate as roses.

i came to see you every day on my lunch break. i came to see you every single day, to watch the way the unnatural light bounced off your gold-dusted face and to wonder who you were, who you'd loved and who'd loved you, the way your voice sounded, the way it would feel to run my hands through your hair.
one day, no one is around, and i reach out to trace the fragile lines of your cheekbones. you are only paint and canvas. an alarm sounds somewhere in the distance.

i am holding you in my arms, you are kissing me with reckless abandon. i feel you laugh into my stunned mouth and i feel your body pressing into mine. it is warm and soft, so much more than paint and canvas.
i smile first into your eyes, and then down at my gold-stained hands.

if you knew
                     how much
i loved you it
                     would
never          
                     be
a question.
i promise
i could be
                     enough
for you.

it was unseasonably warm for a january morning, and
as a result, the front windows of your car were left
cracked open to the lazy morning air

and i saw them hanging there
like open mouths poised to spill their secrets

i searched for a pen.

i thought about writing down all the things i love about you
every time you took my breath away
every fever dream of you and every time i wished i could undress you right then and there
and i was honestly so close.
your windows were open, and i could slip it easily onto your passenger's seat.

but no one was parked on the other side of you,
and i would quite certainly give myself away.
so i didn't risk it, and i'll have to be content
with hoping you wanted to undress me, too

it takes some people

forty years

two kids

a mortgage

and a divorce

to learn that, sometimes, love doesn't mean a **** thing.

lucky me.

it only took me one you.

but i don't understand how i'm supposed to sleep when nothing will be the same when i wake up
how am i supposed to lie down and stop existing for a fleeting lifetime while the seasons spin around me
why do i have to stop to let time pass when no thing stops for me so i can pass
and why do things have to change anyway


forgetting happens but it happens too late but it happens too soon
and soon and lately you can't remember what he smelled like or what his shirt felt like against your saltwater skin or his hands on your face but you remember that he pretended not to know you the last time you saw him and you remember the girlfriend that you pretended didn't exist and you remember that you are a ******* idiot for still remembering these things but the color of his eyes is gone, gone like the summer sky and the salty air that he kissed your temples under and the trees and the song and the muddy sides of the mountain and waterfalls and uke lessons, fireworks and roadkill and you are gone somewhere without a name

you are gone somewhere just past consciousness but just within belief

the belief that maybe you honestly didn't see me walking right past you and this is all just a mistake and soon you will send me another sleepy message with all the periods in the wrong places and when i call you out on it you will respond earnestly and sincerely sorry and when you've lost me nearly i will mention the movie that i really want to see and you will take me and share popcorn and fingertips and nervous giggles and maybe this will end with the linen sheets and cold coffee and soft acoustic caresses and the eyes that remember to shine green in the golden afternoon glowing through the miniblinds of your dorm room that i have imagined a million times over


be calm and be brave because these things will work out and none of this will even matter in 10 years time
i said these things but i never said be patient because none of this will even matter in 10 years time
if you make it 10 years
if you make it through the night

i left my favorite sunglasses in your bed.
and what a perfect metaphor that is
for the other pieces of me
that i won't be getting back
any time soon.

i am a ******* lady.
and you can bet your ***
that i will dress
i will speak
i will act
however the ****
i please.

Wandering mazily in an autumn afternoon,
I in the sunlight and he in the shade,
We met by chance,
Somewhere between sun and geography.

I could tell he had something to say,
A song of despair to sing me,
But my Spanish is sadly limited
And his words revolved around me,
Never colliding with my comprehension.

So we did not speak
Except for sighing
Unuttered words suspended heavily
In a green Santiago sky

It is unlikely I would have understood, anyway
The words from his aging lips
No more than fever understands why it burns.

But mis ojos found his,
Civil war of his head,
Exile of his heart,
And I knew.

Without knowing how
Or when
Or from where
Or even what it was I knew.

But I knew.
Yo sé.
And I understood.
Yo conozco.
And we walked.

i am afraid to see you,
because i am afraid you will covet parts of me
that i have cultivated on my own.

the color yellow,
regina spektor and ukeleles, blazers and old dogs.
pieces of you embedded in me.

yours.

but mine are sunny days, and glittery pop music
the way i drive my green car too fast
and my red lipstick

my habit of singing reckless harmonies
to the songs on the radio
going away to college and dyeing all my hair pink.

mine.

i don't want to see you.
because harmonizing with you means losing something that i found on my own, and leaving my red lipstick on your face--and we both know it will come to that-- will only leave my lips pale and wan and you telling me to slow down means that i will never drive alone again and whether you tell me that i should or should not dye my hair and run away i will do the opposite just to spite you and not for the happiness that is finally mine.

and *******, you do not get to galavant back into my life with your
"Happy birthday! <3"
and your
"I'll be in town this weekend, can I see you?"
and run my life again with your manipulative *******
that i learned to absorb into my bloodstream,
or spit back into your face
because i had to get rid of you

i don't want you to know what my new favorite book is.
or about that one movie that i've watched of my own accord more than once
or the song that makes me cry about the future because these things are mine. I do not belong to you anymore and I will never belong to you again so long as my heart is my own and if i have to give up seeing you forever to make that so, then so be it.

i don't carry a lighter
but, baby,
i would hold a match to the entire free world
just so you could light your cigarette
on the flames of civilization going to ****.
i love the smell of capitalism cremating
and of you breathing your slow death
into my trembling lungs.

We
Elegantly juxtaposed
Against the backdrop
Of the stars that obstruct.
The space between you and I
Trembles.

what i said:
"you sound rough this morning."


what i meant:
"your voice is lavender and honey and tea time and supernovas colliding with gentle breezes and if i could wake up to it, just once, cocooned in a tangle of your arms and couch cushions and that blanket you keep in the back of your car, i swear by the stars in my eyes no one on this godforsaken planet would be out of earshot of my singing

i hope that tonight when i dream of you--it is no longer a matter of uncertainty, but anticipation--you speak like you've just overslept your alarm and frantically motored yourself to where i am, like is the case today.

i wish you had chosen me but if i could only listen to you speak to me, about anything--rivers or math homework or football or belonging or music or even your girlfriend--i promise i would listen with the beating urgency of a swimmer in a frozen stream, i would savor each word from your lips, like they were the spring and i was the underground daisy waiting for your kiss.

and in precisely three days i will have an essay to compose about a beautiful topic that would consume me thoroughly were it not for the memory of your groggy morning voice, so full of raspy complacency i can't breathe but instead of fulfilling my obligations i will be hashing out halfway comprehensible poetry about you and crying about how i cannot recreate the sound of your voice with any combination of hollowly clicking keys.

you are so beautiful that i could spend the remainder of my life with a five-subject notebook, scrawling 'your eyes. your smile. your hands. your voice' over and over endlessly and die feeling as though i had lived a thousand years of quiet adventure.

you are so much and too much for me and i have no idea why you see as much in me as you do but i will not question it, for fear that if i were to come too close to you, to run my fingers along the marvel of your face you would shrivel and unfurl into nonexistence, like the leaf in the fire."


and also:
"why can't your voice always sound like this?"

and finally:
"******* you're attractive"

my friends
will all forget me
when i leave
and i can't do a ****
thing about it

i wish playing ukelele didn't remind me of you
i wish the beach didn't remind me of you
i wish fireworks didn't remind me of you
i wish you didn't wear that one cologne that everyone wears because it reminds me of you and i smell you in every wannabe prepster boy that passes me on his way to the pencil sharpener
i wish other girls didn't remind me of you because you're always talking to them but not me
i wish holst suites didn't remind me of you, particularly the first
i wish sunrises didn't remind me of you
i wish late nights didn't make me think of you
i wish the ghost of your skin didn't haunt this entire town
until i am seeing tessellations of your silhouette in the brick walls you pressed me against
i wish i weren't afraid to call you
i wish you'd call me first
i wish that song didn't remind me of you
and by that song i mean that entire folder of songs on my computer,
the one entitled whatever because that is all you were supposed to mean to me
but now, you are more, more than a whatever
and whatever did i have to dream of before i kissed you?
i wish i could sleep
but the morning reminds me of how i'll never wake up next to you