On days like today, I am the sky. You are sitting on an old stool in the kitchen. Clad in blue pajamas, burnt caramel hair hanging over your eyes. You are reading a book, it is old and yellow. I find myself building a treehouse for us in my mind. You are a poet’s death of choice. Your fingers slide gently down the side of the page as you turn it, glancing over at me. You let out a sigh and give me a small smile. This is my garden song. This is my first right. My Sunday morning. I think I loved you before I knew how. Some people, they are artists and some people are art and my god, darling, you are both. I want to read the poems you write when you think God isn’t watching. Let’s make love and fall asleep in each other’s arms and wake up just to make love again. Take me to your favorite museum. Show me how gentle you can be. When you are at a loss of words, kiss me and I will spill a new language into your mouth. I will kiss you in places you never knew existed. I touch the parts of you that have been kept behind a curtain. This is my garden song and today, I am the sky. Tomorrow, we will bloom under the September rain and and slowly dig each other’s graves.

So many lines and laments
scribed in ink and feeling,
for the girl who is the ocean

but she is a swell and surge
too dauntless and wild,
for a lover whose bones crave the shore.

She craves the squalls and gusts,
and cast iron skies,
a worldly drift to sate the salt in her skin,
the deep pull of currents in her blood.

She is chaotic but not reckless,
she is fickle, but not feckless.
Love her boldly or not at all
her bones belong to the sea
but she will always return to the shore.

In bars wandering amid the metal and cages,
amid the loud banging of voices, dull as broken bells
rung from the sloshing of drinks, in shirts red inked with wine.
Smoulder and fog, cigarettes now drawn and dead
down this cold alley of vagrants painting nightly,
wildly until dawn.

It used to be
exciting just before the dawn
It used to be
amazing to see a shooting star's swarm
It used to be
frightening to stand out in a storm
It used to be
all of these and so so so much more

I used to marvel
at the ways that were of woman
I used to marvel
at the way a baby lay sleeping
I used to do a lot of things
that now I would not undertake
I used to do a lot things
that I now know were mistakes

I used to , used to ,
but now I'm all used up
I am awake before the dawn
but it wasn't by choice or fate
And as I search a cloudless sky
looking for the star that passed me by
I'm thinking to myself
"used to" comes softly with a sigh