If I could tell you anything tonight it’d be don’t leave.

Don’t take the embryotic hope that you put under my skin
And the soul I’ve finally found again tangled in your curls

It’d be that the way you move your legs at night
When you’re restless about how twenty years later
Is only ten more years away
My heart tunes itself to the motions of your mind tracing out your future

It’d be that your hands coat my body like lithium
Silvery and toxic in excess
The only thing I need every day

You’re a regimen I don’t have the resolve to break
I’m resolved to not break myself anymore
I think I’d tell you that.

That I’m done tearing into myself
And ripping out highways of neglect
That I built into myself

That I will stay through to the end of this tunnel
Dark and winding
I’ll never leave myself

So if you could postpone the morning
And wrap me in a temporary ease
I hope you wouldn’t leave.

The sounds of your breath in the morning
When there are thunderclouds waiting on the stoop
You crawl into my veins like rainfall
My ventricles feel damp

And heavy.
Caught in the tangle of how your words feel
And how your hands feel
When rays of sun can’t find us

I lose myself driving through this mist
Of the sounds that form from your throat at midnight
And I emerge soft and dazed with something burning
In the center of my chest

The way your fingers trace out maps on my ribcage
Directions away from a person I don’t have to be again
Your clothes smell like promises
That I’ve been whispering against your chest while you laugh

The softness of your mouth on my temple
When you let the door shut behind you
And leave me in the quiet of your morning fog

I’m rooted in the secrets that your sheets hold
And in the kindness of your hands on my back
Pulling me away from the stormy place that I’ve been
For so long

And into you.
Honeyed, tempered, and warm.

I’m walking across these stones like they are photographs mapped onto the tapestry of our togetherness
Threaded with the feeling of beads of sweat on our lower backs and *** backstroking through our veins
Walking under this night sky feels like moving under the impenetrable tunnel of the summer that I met you

And the times this sky was the only witness to the way my eyes learned to search for you under its cover
Or the memory of my arched body under yours that only these spaces can recall

This space will hold you if ever I cannot
And will be impressed with the gravity of your existence if ever I no longer am

Under this particular scattering of distant solar systems
No run of time will ever obscure a history already traced onto these roads
Or the scar of our entangled youth on these rooftops

Walking across this corner
Of this island
Of this universe
There is a feeling of being familiar to these trees and this elegant passage of time

As if in a moment in which I have never existed before
I have already been and somehow become what I already know I will never be again

The sky is dark and studded with associations that will rustle under my feet come October
And rustle still at the equinox

And the path is long and yet gone beneath my feet as I walk along
Under a sky that knew you when I did not
And will hold you in its grasp for as long as I may go down this alley
In this city

To which these stones
Our stones
Will always belong

I miss you.

Because it’s five p.m.
And the sun keeps going down without you

And that’s a funny thing since you were always the one making it move
And the world’s still moving around me
And I haven’t moved an inch

From the safety of your sleeves that I can’t pull myself out of
And the album of you asleep in my lap
That you don’t even know exists

And I can’t look at anything anymore
Because everything looks like you
And everything’s a shadow jumping out at me

I’m paranoid about the anniversary of everything you made me feel
That’s lingering in two o’clocks on September thirteenths
And in every day we spent together
Which I really thought would be all of them

You’re everywhere inside of my veins so how are you not here
Because your laugh is stuck in the stutter of my pulse
And the way the blood that runs up my arms still tastes like you

Metallic and bittersweet
I miss you

That’s all I wanted to say.

I’m one foot out the door and both feet over the edge
I’m an inch away from out of my mind and ******* it this hurts

I’m in limbo in between being myself and being a mess
And I’m never one or the other

I’m twisted in knots and tangled in sheets thrown over the remains of my personhood

And I’m not making any sense
I’m not making anything, not a sound, not a living

I’m statistical noise. Affordably omitted from any rational decision

I’m not a rational decision anyone would make

I wouldn’t make the choice of making me again but I guess it was never my choice anyways

I’m hovering in the space in between saying you’re okay and meaning it
On the precipice of feeling human without actually feeling it at all

Someone please push me
Over the edge that I’m slowly edging closer to

Someone just pull me back

Just push me

Gossamer and lemon drops
I’d be serendipity if I could
An evening stretched out across a field of pleasant contingencies
I’d be the way the sunlight hides itself in your hair
The way sundown feels like an anesthetic so you never feel darkness at all
And it’s all I ever feel
For you I’d be a solar system
Spinning. Not because I’m necessary, just because I am
Elegance and a box of wine, I’d be the moment your wheels kiss the runway
And if I could, I’d be starlight
Stretched in front of you, I’d be something infinite
If I could

He found her body in the lattice of jet-streams
That had carried her away from herself
At the bottom of an ocean she dug herself
Fingers broken, palms dry
With dirt lodged under her fingernails
And blood tucked into the back of her mouth

He found her tongue in cheek
Sloppy print scribbled across the receipt in her pocket
Advil, number two pencils, and peppermints
He found her on the horizon already out of reach
Something blue already springing up from the soil beneath her

He found her after she’d showed herself the way out
No lock on the door, no warmth left in her touch
She left with an apology for ever being there at all
And a hand outreached for someone to take her
Anywhere where she could grow

He found her on a Sunday night right before the day reset itself
Put her in his arms, tucked her apology into his lungs
And left her in the soil

And he reset himself again