I’m lying on the ground where you first kissed me
With my back against the cracks in the concrete
Back when I had summer breath
And you had child’s eyes

It was always sunny where we went
Hearts and hands intertwined
A heatwave of young love, and iced teas
And the way your tongue felt cool on my neck

And today it’s cold and the ground is damp with snow
But it’s as warm here as it’s ever been.

I’m looking at my reflection in the window of a coffee shop
That will always belong to us
And the love story that only a place like this could ever hold
Where the warmth of you drives away clouds.

It’s finally winter in Ann Arbor
So I guess it makes sense that you’re not here anymore
Because a thousand miles and winters couldn’t untangle
My love from you from here

“I miss summer, and long hair, and lab, and espresso, and the library, and everything about this place. But mostly I just miss him.”
(March 2013)

I’m tired of playing tug of war
With your worn out affection for me
And your inability to tell me what you mean

Of standing in the glow of how you don’t even miss me
Not even a little bit
Trying to reach me out from under the door

I’m sore from longing for
The stolen bits of skin you’re still taking from me
Pieces of hip bones and freckled shoulders

I’m at risk of imploding
Under the conflicted forces
Of your admiration and disdain for me

And I already ripped myself open for you
A thousand times in the cross currents
Of my desire to be yours

And now you’re just emptying me out
And scraping the last bits of dignity
From my lungs

Pulling me in directions I couldn’t go if I tried
My stomach is knotted up between the poles of your feelings
Hovering over the line
Waiting for the drop

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.

At eighteen I'm the scent of second-day hair with perfume in it
It smells like your bed, and my sweat, and your exhales, and my Juicy Couture Viva la Juicy . How middle school of me.  
I'm the cool touch of unwashed sheets on bare skin because the thermostat is fussy and I like sleeping naked
Just me, you, and this body that I don't like so much right now, but I'm eighteen, and I'm working on that.
I'm leggings while they still pass for pants, and the chewed up ends of pens in twenty different colors
Chinese homework has really turned me into such a biter, and I claim to love all those darling pens equally, but I show my blue pens the most love
I've teethed them half to death
I'm not even close to halfway to death assuming things go well for me. Oh, please let things go well for me.

At eighteen I'm the taste of chai and menthol because that's what's **** these days
I'm all about what's **** these days. Apathy, really bad electronic music, bare midriffs.
Funny since at eighteen I don't want anyone to touch me
This body is my project, please don’t even look at me like this, all insecure and exposed. Please just let me curl up, and please let me be by myself.
I wish my mother were here to bring me a popsicle. My throat hurts from all the screaming I do these days.

At eighteen I guess I'm still a little angsty, but I just want you to love me
God, do I want you to love me.
I want you to patronize me with the warmth of your arms and undress me with strong, resolved hands
Don't touch me, just look at me and tell me that I'm perfect and naive because at eighteen I'm still milky white, soft, and broken
I'm a sight for sore eyes, a new sight, your sight
For god's sake
Just love me.

There are hands all over me, searching for something I'm not sure I have to give, something that's no longer mine to give if it's even there at all
There are these scathing, tracing, imploring hands all the ******* time, and their grasp tightens when I pull away, whispering "what's the rush, sweetheart"
And then kissing my shoulders, my neck, my hands.
God, these hands. This burning.
There are hands that are constantly touching me where I can't even touch myself, where I can't even stand to look.
Don't touch my stomach. Don't touch my thighs. Don't touch my scars.
Just don't. *******. touch. me.
Please, just... please?
They're in my hair now, on my waist then
around my neck
And still they're always wanting more. What part wasn't enough, I wonder.
Or maybe it was just all of me. But I'm so soft.
I'm so beautiful.
I'm so ****.
So I go back then, shameful, shameless, so **** ashamed, back into the dark, caressing cold
To spend another night shaking in another pair of hands to hold me
Please, just.... please
Why can't anyone please just hold me?

She’s the kaleidoscope aggregate
Of men who never loved her
And empty bottles of *****

Tucked into the corner
Of another someone’s mind
Without the mind to run away
From mistakes that made themselves habits

There are constellations
That she’ll never connect
Even if the stars lined up at her feet

She’d break them between her thumb
And her fingertips
That always taste like earth and bleach

Because she’s strands of sadness
Lighting her path through a world of love
That she’s always on the wrong side of

Watching the light
Waiting to cross

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.

We were driving through a lightning storm
When I was struck by the idea that I could end up like this

Like insomnia on winding highways
And background music

With you falling asleep to the soundtrack of our
Battering mutual affection

And nothing should be beautiful about a body that’s just at rest

But I steal glances of you sleeping
Like they’re hits

And my god, it just might **** me
Because how breathtaking you are
Injects itself into my veins
And my lungs give in

There was frost on the windows
And droplets of how perfect you are to me collecting on my mind

Recently you’ve been always on my mind
And under my skin
On the highway out in front of me

Just flashes of brown eyes
And kindness blanketed over me
When my own heart has been making me cold

There were signs that said we’re 1000 miles from anywhere
But I’m happy being nowhere with you
Or wherever it is we are

It was 4am
And my heart was thundering
While you slept at my side

Just barely out of reach

Today you’ve hollowed me out
Because there are holes in my shoes
From chasing you
Hoping you could fill the holes in my heart

And this is tugging me out to sea
Like a riptide
I think I’ve already gone under

Undercover in the shadows of your silence
As I watch you from a corner you’ll never come to anymore
And wonder what I’ve done

There’s something punitive about the way I love you
And I lost you when I thought it was you that was strangling me
But it turns out it’s still me

Today I’m the version of me that you would love to hold
Who’s broken and tired of trying on personalities like hats
I’m miserable

The me who needs to be scooped into your arms
Because my heels are bleeding from running
Away from myself

The version of myself who’s not here at all
Because I became yours instead of becoming me
So I never became anyone at all

There are no more arms to run to
And I’m alone
And it’s just a Tuesday

I’m drowning out here
In the ocean of apologies I still owe you

What if I’m forever lost at sea

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

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

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 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

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

I leaned out the window and breathed in
And it didn’t taste so musty
Today it wasn’t so dry

I peaked the tip of my nose out into the world of 3 years later
And my hair dripped down onto the pavement
Fifteen stories below me
Like this September’s first thunderstorm

Dropping everything to be right where you are
I scaled the walls of this fortress in the middle of a heat spell
And if my heart is going to break then ******* it I’ll do it myself

I have a heart of graphite and secrets
And it’s been hiding in the margins of your life for so long
That I wonder what it will feel like to erase myself from you

I’ve been feeling inky and insignificant lately
Because you love me
Like doodles on the side of a skyscraper I just jumped from the balcony of

And when I hit the world below me
I shattered like glass, lethal and bright
And you ran out of me like I ran out on you

Welcome to the scent of asphalt
Here’s to something sad etched out in my penmanship
Flashing down below the skyline

Here’s to something new.

I would dig you an ocean if you'd swim in it, but you would always insist it's too cold. And I could take all the energy I invested in your happiness and warm the entire ocean over, but then you would say it's too warm, or too *****, too big, too small.
I would build you a home if you'd live in it, but you would complain about how the floors creak, and how everything isn't just exactly how it should be. I could sweep all of the dust under the couch where you would never see all of the leaks, and holes, and cracks, but you wouldn't even like the furniture. You wouldn't like any of it.
I would take all my love back if I knew how to - how to drain an ocean of years upon years of tears that I wasted on you.
But you took my love with you when you left for the other side of this country. And while you sit in a beautiful new house, looking out at a beautiful new ocean, I'll be here, in this miserable dry spell, hoping that if I swim all the way across this ******* ocean that it will bring me back to you.

A clearing in the middle of existing
I’ll be the place you’re looking up from
The dampness on your palms when you push yourself up
From the ground floor of this skyscraper life you’re scaling

I’ll be your secret, I’ll be your anything
I’ll be an envelope sealed with the wetness of your mouth
Postmarked to “this one time when I was young I…”
Just run-on sentences  that you won’t be able to finish in the morning

I’ll be your Saturdays, but I’d like to be your Tuesdays
And the scent of second-day dishes in the sink
And detergent lifting into the rafters with the frothiness of your laughter
Following your life upwards

A string of messages, constantly being cleared
I’ll be a back door to wherever you want to go
Just hands on the back of your neck
Or just the bottom of the bottle so that you might drown your troubles in me

Since I’m drowning in you

Not poetry.

But please read? It's important. I promise.

http://32ozofgoodness.blogspot.com/2015/02/i-had-no-idea-taking-my-life-back-from.html