I feel the heat of your shoulder bleeding into mine. We are laying in the grass. No- we are laying in my bed. No- your bed. The TV is on. You fell asleep in my lap playing video games. I'm wearing red lipstick. Moments earlier, I arched my back like a kitten and took a picture of us sprawled over one another. You weren't looking. My lipstick is red. My shirt is red. My skirt has flowers. Your hair is bleached on the top. I peel the blankets from us and now it's grown out, curving over your forehead in a w. You're wearing all these pukka shell and wooden necklaces. I don't know what gave you the idea. It doesn't match. I love you. I love you so much I giggle just tracing the curve of your nose. We watch YouTube videos slowed down and laugh until we fall asleep, your hip bones pressed into the small of my back. I open my eyes and we're back in 2015. We're eating pizza, but not too much, because your stomach problems are just beginning. You accidentally say you love me back when we part at sunset. The gazebo is in the background. It's always in the background. I walk away and find myself back at your door. You struggle with the key for a moment. We just got off the bus. You couldn't drive yet. I saw your dog, pet her on the top of her head, nose turned away from her rotting teeth. Your bird sings when we walk away and we laugh at how he hates us. I stop laughing and he's dead. Your mom threw him away. You were more heartbroken than you told your friends while you laughed in the library. I shut the door behind me and you're shaking your head no a year later, me asking if we can talk, last weeks tears prickling my mind.  You say you'll think about it. You don't. I do.

(The day I met you, I relented: “Friend, do what you are here to do.”)

I flicked the gas card between my fingers. We had $50 to do whatever we wanted, maybe even take that aquarium trip up to Boston we had talked about so much. Your birthday was a month ago, you were then 17. This was the second birthday of yours we shared together and before you left- not before I told you to drive carefully, my love, and before you forgot all the leftover cake at my house- you kissed my cheek. I laughed into the naked air over my bed- Judas. You are my Judas. The Bible never taught me anything.

I don't think you know what anger can do to a person. You see, I haven't cried about you once. Not once, in one year. I have laid in the same spot where we first kissed, and I have not imagined your clumsy lips over mine.  I realized then you could love something more than yourself- as yourself. The heat from your shoulder never bled out of my body. But, I do not imagine much more.

And maybe I'll be here, standing in the spot where we looked to the stars, a spot whose coordinates will never be written in history books, a spot with numbers I have no reason to remember but I will, and I will be screaming, where are you? Where did you go? Where did I go?

But I know exactly where you are. I will know you are lying asleep in your too-neat bedroom, the one blanket you had before me pressed over you like origami. I will know you are not thinking of me, and definitely not dreaming of me because you do not dream.

And I will know that when we were 15, we dreamed about 18. You could finally drive to who knows where, the window of your car down, music as loud as the law allows, the soft Cali sunlight sainting you. But now, my Judas, you are a birthday and a lifetime away, and where you are now and forever is wherever I left you when we last held hands.

(Today: “I will not kiss Thee as did Judas; but as the thief, I will confess Thee: Lord, remember me in Thy kingdom.”)

I dream of you often.

At the start, it was always me yelling. I’d run up to you, teary-eyed, (not for the first time) and asked if you knew how you’d hurt me. Your face would be blank, your lips slightly parted.  I felt like a rabid dog, muzzled by the scraps left of my humanity, but ready to lunge off to administer rough justice. My teeth gnashed and chipped when caught by each other. I felt my hands twist into fists, my eyes the hollow barrels of a sawed-off shotgun.

Sometimes you’d come to me, haloed by the morning light in my bedroom. Sometimes you’d apologize, or just be there. Things would seem fine. The hint of tension in my chest was nearly imperceptible in the face of the the rapture I felt, the face of you. I’d trace your knuckles, staring down at the half moons of your nails, cut to the quick. I cannot remember your expression, but I remember your warm breath. I’d wake up and say I didn’t like it, as I try to drift off and dream again.

Lately it’s me chasing you, never quite close enough. I see you right there, right in front of me, looking just as you had when I left. But the truth?

You are one thousand suns away, in a corner of the universe darker than the centers of your eyes.

Snow falls onto the frozen lakes of your glasses. I can't see your breath through the cloud of mine anymore. You're silent, but I can still feel your voice in my fingertips. Your hands verse worry into the folds of your jacket, clutched like a lifeline.

Words don’t come to us, we are two people, breathing out our lives into a world so vacant, honeyed and infinite- we will perpetually feel that we are a few years and a universe away from not alone.

And I’ll recall nothing of the tragedy that beats infinitely behind the bones of your chest- our chests- so fallible, yet drumming its knuckles on its living casket, so fervently, you’d think it knew nothing of sadness or longing or death. I feel that to be true sometimes. I am now only traumatized by soft kisses on my cheekbones, and the sound of laughter inside parked cars.

And even here, now, no words will come to me. You are so close that the heat of your body melts the frost tingling along my forearms. I guess, if I’m guilty of anything, it’s thinking I can move the world, even just an inch closer, just so our elbows touch. Then, I know you’d flush with the terror of importance, knowing that your end is many more ends.

So I keep my distance as we lay with the cold to our backs, faces to the empty-not-empty sky, and let the snow cover our mistakes, dissipating our frail bodies into a million tiny oblivions.

I. He Will Refuse To Find a Way Up
A fifth hole in the wall this week opens and I crawl inside it while your knuckles are still freshly bleeding. I will find myself grasping at straws to justify your rage. You reflect it back onto me, an uneasy mirror that makes me want to tear open my own cathartic hands and find what made me so angry so long ago. I shake my head. I have loved you. I have helped you grow. I have been the soil you have stretched roots in and the fields of lavender you have scorched. I let myself let you go before I crawl into another drywall void.

II. She Will Not Be What You Remember
I can hear the echo of my voice reverberate where I thought your heart was. Your soft hair that ran through my fingers smells like burning hair. Oh, these things cannot be taken back, I know, I know. I will watch you turn to sand in the hourglass on my nightstand, next to rose petals, bottle caps, and other sentimentally valued found objects. You will trickle to the bottom grain by grain and be unstuck. It will mean nothing. I will watch it as time passes and try to break it no more.

III. You Will Have to Let him Go
We did it, like I promised: we laid with the cold to our backs, faces to the empty-not-empty sky, and let the snow cover our mistakes, dissipating our frail bodies into a million tiny oblivions. You fell apart, your ashes blown across several states, thousands of miles. I caught your dust between my teeth and when I flicked it off my tongue, it spelled poems and threats and manifestos in languages I could never understand. You're dragged by your heels into the hospital, cursing my name as my heart breaks. I'm sorry, my baby, my little brother, I'm sorry to the child I tried to raise like my own. Schizophrenia is a hard word to learn in every language, and understand in yours. I did not want to lose you. But sometimes, you weigh your sins, and the heaviest of all is the one that's easiest to utter into the world.

IV: How It Will Go
I've wanted to talk to you for a while.
> I know.
So...
> So?
So, I can't tell if I've missed you or not.
> ...
What I mean is, how do we know this is right?
> It is. We're no good for each other.
We're new people, well- maybe not new, but much different. I don't know if me now will like you now, but me now is longing for you then.
> You're not making any sense.
I know. I just want to say I'm sorry. I don't even know how to begin to say it.
> Sure.
I am.
> Alright.
Some part of me still loves you. She is biting her tongue because she doesn't want your name to roll oh so comfortably off of it ever again.
> Stop.
I'm sorry. I don't want to make this complicated again. I don't know why I'm doing this. I'm stupid I'm-
> Just shut up, okay?
Okay.

That night, I will claw into my throat and release the shrieks of grief snowpacked in it. I will congratulate myself on allowing the sun to set on the most golden thing I've ever been given the chance to hold.

My lungs will still take in air and send it back into the sky for you to return to me. It won't be the same. It won't be comforting. It'll sting and needle at my soft insides, sending all the words you ever spoke to me into my blood in tangles until it clogs my veins and makes its way to my brain. I will be left with half my face permanently lopsided, stuck in a frown, while trying to remember what did it in the first place.

V: Ideally, as if In a Dream*
The sun is dripping down your hair. It steams in golden runnels down your forehead and it casts a halo in your eyes, sainting you.
I am blessing all the uneaten meals, broken skin, and chewed up fingernails. I will bless how I raised hell and then settled it back into the dirt so I could bring down heaven for you and I, and it's warm, bright caress. The sweet, sticky clouds- they smell like marshmallow and clean laundry and kisses on the forehead.
I will be able again to think of your thin hands as being prom-queen-gown-silk swaddling blue jay bones: fragile and masculine and hollow and splintered all in one. I will run my fingers over your knuckles- as soft and as familiar as my baby blankets.
You will breathe in deeply, and I will too, just for the sake of doing it together.
I will say, "I've been waiting for this."
And you will say, "For what?"
And I will say, "this," just looking around.

The fragile space between each rib, with skin draped over it like a table cloth.
The fragile space between scars, between your eyes, between our hearts when you're in my arms. The fragile space between almost and never.
Why is it that so much in life is fragile?
I will look at each face I pass and memorize the number of freckles on the right cheek, the left.
I will throw my graduation cap in the air, and my first born child will be in my arms when I look down. My best friend married, another dead.
I will see my college essay turn into dissertation into report on fifth ****** this week, downtown D.C. Yup, it's serial.
I will leap into the arms of my childhood friend, into the arms of my mother, into the grave-
and it'll all seem so very fragile, as delicate and as beautiful as a bird's wing.

You're gonna do this like,
Johnny Cash.
Pills, pills, and public drunkenness until
I love you.
More.
"June Carter, will you marry me?"
Well, I'll tell you Johnny, let's see you walk the line first,
Sober,
Say your A B ******* C's, darling.
Say them once and say them twice,
And say it when we're not being watched,
*******.

The people she adores,
She cuts them all into pieces,
Skewered,
Slid neatly into her open mouth.

She runs out of food,
Chews on you,
Hates your bones,
And how they cut her cheeks.
Your spilling blood slick,
Smudging her face,
Like lipstick.

The truth
Will set you free
But;
Not until it's done with you.

You will wake up with bruises
You made in your sleep.

(Good luck with those ****** sheets)

More often than not, I feel like a head case taking up space.
I mean, maybe it's less often than not? Who knows? I can't keep track of the hours, the days, the months, the friends, the loss, the love, and the dreams.
The dreams. I reach for them and feel them soak into my skin like smoke.
Are they there? Are they gone? Are they with me? Without?
Are you there?
...

I'm starting to wonder if I fall for every pair of eyes that go googly when locked with mine
I wonder how much I'm searching for a way out of not knowing and into heaven
which really, sounds a lot like certainty
I don't know how much my heart can bend under the weight of all the lives I hold in my delicate and numb fingertips before it breaks
I just want to be safe
I just want to be loved
I don't wanna be a trophy wife
I don't wanna be anything but happy

I feel the softly fluttering wings of my heart, like the singing birds of cold mornings where footsteps are as soft as ghostly snowfall. Your face buried in my shoulder, your breath turns my skin into warm velvet. Your hands bloom petals of warmth into mine where shaking stops and finds purpose in my arms.

I think "Okay, this is hopeless." just to find a new context to lie to myself in. I'll try to deny it for days, but it really becomes hours.

"Love is a neurochemical con-job," I think in intervals with your breaths. Your favorite song plays in the background, swept away into the wind and towards the moon smiling down on us saying, "I've seen this billions of times before. Just admit it."

I'll tell her to be quiet. I can't handle another heartbreak. She'll tell me this is different and I'll sigh out. Maybe. Just maybe.

I'm watching my life be spit back to me, through gods mouth, God threw me away into the swamps of the ugliest parts of Louisiana, where mosquitos don't dare lay their eggs. This is where the bodies of eagles rot and pedophiles and racists scrape up road **** for what it's worth and I am left searing on the road in the shimmering heat, waves from tar, crows circle in black masses, mass proceeds as the church burns, burn me with it, gracious god. I'm begging you to make my ashes worth something.

God sings out "Dastardly bastardly catastrophe girl, downing whole pill bottle model girl, where are you?" You called? I'm sitting in a parking lot, thinking how the man in front of me lot drinks a lot. He thinks he should quit a lot for his wife and kids who he loves a lot. That man from the parking lot, he bought himself another bottle of liquor with his wife's credit card. Life spins around me and I don't have time to keep up. I see you in front of me. I think of that a lot.

Beast of skipping stones, slip over me like the snake you are, wait for that Saint to catch you, hit the nail on the head and let it crucify you.

December gray makes its way into your old house, the one which you know which walls you were slammed against. Your mom sits sipping coffee in a chair.

She whispers, "I could **** you with kindness but let's see what's laying around first."  She wants to make blood soup out of you. She'll tell you to quit whining as she wrings your crooked spine. She wants all survivor, no guilt.

Hey, I heard if you get high enough you can forgive yourself. I heard if you drink a lot you stop thinking. A mobs a mob all the same even if they're with you so let's make it like this, an army of drug addicts that sympathize with you. Holding needles and spoons and blunts and razor blades with you.

We sit under the stars and look at the sky a lot. Does the night sky ever look like it does in photographs?

I push a pin through the thin film of silence and listen to your thoughts hiss out with the air behind it. I wonder how many things people don't say. Because I know I don't say that I love you, and that I've never been more in love with anything than your laugh, or that I miss you always, or that I still know all your favorite candies, or that I don't exactly want to get over you. I know what you think and don't say doesn't match up to that exactly but that's okay. I can keep admiring the soft curve of your nose and lips when you're smiling. You won't know that I think of it whenever the sun comes out.

You, you're like the sun coming out. I know you'd argue against that, but up close the sun is as hostile as it gets, nothing can touch it. But from afar it's so beautiful and want and bright- and what I'm saying is you're not as bad as you think you are. And I need you. Just like every rose on this earth needs the light.

Maybe it's all cliché. But ****'s cliché for a reason, you know? Love is a very collective feeling. It's different for everyone, but so collective. I'm sure I've been on the receiving end of the way I look at you, but I wasn't looking in that direction.

And you're not necessarily looking in mine either. So what I'm saying is you wouldn't know love if it stared you in the face. Because it is, it has been. But it's okay, it's better to burn out than fade away, and I've been looking at the sun too long to know if it's looking back anyway.

It's 2 am and I want to know why my hands are still twisting knots in my hair, trying to busy themselves from writing out "I love you, sometimes." I don't know when I don't, but I'm hoping it's in me somewhere because if not, I have no hope to ever say that with any conviction. I mean, maybe if I was a little drunk I could pretend to laugh at you. But, really, you fill up my whole heart. I hate it in the way people hate beautiful things that they can't have, like a kid in a candy store. It is child-like, how I cry over you. And you don't notice, not really. I can see it in the way children pick leaves off trees and let them fall to the ground without second thought after the initial satisfying snap. Every time I see a sunflower, head bowed with the heaviness of its petals, I'll think of you. Snow reminds me of you too. In fact, most things remind me of you. I would say only sometimes, but that's a lie I can't even tell myself.

I watch myself fade and wilt in your eyes like valentines flower petals from their vase, falling onto the white desk dirtied with graphite and candy wrappers below. There's thirty one letters from colleges and three love notes left there to peel up at the corners and get stuck with bubblegum but nothing leaves the taste of metal in my mouth more than "Michigan". I'm terrified every day of you leaving. I'm more terrified of your hair being out of place and your smile not being the way I remember it. Do you ever think of the way it would be if you loved me back? Sometimes I wish you'd force yourself into things the way I always do when I'm fitting into prom dresses or looking into my own eyes in the mirror, trying to decide if they're green or hazel like my mom insists every time I fill out a passport application. Think of how my hands would look in yours, the way my chipped nail polish would match your veins, thinly creeping up your arms like you haven't tried to carve them out with office supplies and hours of crying in circles. Sometimes I think I ought to just kiss you, remind you that it's easy to fake things. You should know. Sometimes I dream of holding the side of your face in the bold and silently rotting static of my room and saying "let's run away" and we don't really go anywhere, it's just us, the very edge of the half moon of our shoulders touching, warm like sunshine on pebbles. Most of the time, I don't wish for much. I just wish I could stare into your eyes for even a second without feeling the blood run into my face. Or just that I could look at you. You feel like forever and a universe away and I don't know if that's because you're so perfect or because I only ever see you after your hockey games, which ended exactly five days ago, by the way. Not that I'm counting or anything. And not to say that I miss the way that when I hugged you, I could feel your shoulder blades and the gentleness of your hand on my back, but I'd give anything to feel that again. I never knew if it was as awkward for you as it was life saving for me. You still have no idea how much I looked forward to seeing you even for those painful few minutes where, despite us not making eye contact once, you'd smile at least three times, every time. Again, not that I've been counting. Maybe it was just because you were anxious, but that's okay. They say it helps. I don't know who "they" are, but at this point, I trust anything that holds hope to make you happy. To be honest, I'm not really even sure what your voice sounds like, but I know your laugh like I know the crooked tip of my nose or the smell of vanilla incense. It's all I can think about when I go to sketch anymore, but I can't get the lines right. Amen to that, because I never want to be so in love with a single moment again and because really, I never want it to be over. I just want to make you laugh forever. I just want to see the way your eyes crinkle like that until the sun swallows itself whole and then we all can't see anything ever again. I'd want it just like that, the last light flickering as you come as close to happy as you can be. I'll make you laugh until you're dumb and dizzy and maybe then you'll love me. And maybe you would have to be dumb to love me. But I'll still kiss your nose every night in my dreams and pretend I mean anything to you like you do me.

Dreaming of you keeps me awake.
And I find myself here in the same place everyday,
trying to write out the way my heart skips a beat every time you even look at me but
I know it's never gonna be anything other than what it is right now,
me drinking ***** until I can't see your face burned into the back of my eyelids and pass out every other weekend.
And maybe I'm fine with it.
Maybe the way your smile makes me forget everything I've ever known about myself, and love, and breathing is enough.
But it's in the way my hands shake when I even think of you looking at someone else the way I do you that I know I can't do this forever.
And maybe I'll drink that away too.

I chase after you as I drift off,
waking up with my hand reaching towards empty space.
The only heaven worth wanting is your smile and
I see your face in my dreams every night like it's all a beautiful broken record.
It's skipping on the part where you say
you love me back.
And if fate means being asleep forever,
I'll close my eyes and stay right where I am,
waiting for you.

I turn my heart back to a time
when my silver nail polish
hadn't flaked off like
dandruff into the
rolling sea of my carpet.
My hand hangs over
the edge of my bed
as tears fall
down my cheeks.
I picture your face,
the gentle blue of your
gentle eyes and the gentle
curve of your nose, perfect
in my own mind.
I wonder how I ever
deserved to meet you.  
I think of your nervousness
and how I want to hold it,
arms thrown around its neck,
face buried selfishly in
it's shoulder.
How I want to press the anxiety
that fills your chest
into origami
cranes.
I cry and cry and think
maybe,
just maybe,
if I have cried
enough for the both of us,
that you will finally
smile for no reason at all.

Have you ever met someone
that makes you want to grab their
hand, turn it over, and
gently press your lips
into the soft part
of their wrist,
tenderly scarred and
rich in its
flowing deltas of blue veins,
beautifully alive.
Someone who you want
to hold, hold
their shaking existence,  
through the rain,
clicking on the windows
of their ribcage,
through the silent
light of spring,
hard dark
of winter.
You would give
your head and your heart,
to see the sun shine on
the easy curve of their cheeks,
lips parted in a smile
like the dissolution
of ice.

How holy the night looks, dressed in its crushed velvet gown, folding in all the delicate and beautiful places.

I tuck my grief into bed beside me and as I feel it's cold heat, its head careening onto my shoulder, I wish I could have your thin fingers lapping over my wrist, your delicate and blue beauty settling into the space next to me, left by my own two careless eyes. I want to feel your body curled up beside mine, safe and righteous in its temple of quilts and comforters, safely lullabied by a 10 episode Netflix binge, popcorn strewn on the carpet like exploded snowflakes from when I tried to throw it in your mouth, missing because I shook with butterfly laughter.

I want to take your sadness and whisper it to a memory. I want to kiss the fading and cooling parts of the sun back to life. I want to taste what every word you've ever spoken sounds like, feels like, lips on biography on lips on pearl's surface. I want to hold your heart like the wildly beating wings of a tiny bird. I want to love you so much, so beautifully, so genuinely, so big and wide and lovely as the ocean, so that love is spoken back into existence.

Dearest Unreal and Unforgiving God,

It's three weeks to the day an old friend killed himself and I'm counting the ways I've changed.

My world is still upside down, even though I've stopped crying now I can't stop reimagining life in ways to make it tender again.

I swear, I've held my hand out to everyone I've ever wanted to and it's not enough. I can still feel myself falling so incredibly short.

How do you explain to someone how softly you felt for them while they shivered in your arms, how all their scars seemed to run through your heart, tugging your sleeve towards the direction of "I want to love you more and more until you love yourself."? How do you tell them you wanted to rewrite every suicide note, resign it with "never mind"? I can't began to find the words for "I want you to be happy so bad it keeps me up at night."

And hey God, would it **** you to make a miracle happen every once in a while?

I have wanted to spread the incredible, bursting compassion I felt when he died, that terrible, uncontainable empathy, but how is it that words fall short on everyone except I'm sorry?

I'm trying to touch lives in a way that November 27 will again just be a date. I'm trying to make it all right. I'm trying to be the light that could've lit up the dark and made the world turn again.

As you were taking your last breath I hope you felt this.

Hey kid, you've been dead a few weeks and I'd just like to say hello. The ground has its first December coat of fragile snow over your dead body and I know you can't feel the cold but I'll tell you right now, I can see my frozen toes, just barely move them, breathe up into the sky, Id be lying if I said I still cry every day. But, I'm lying to myself if I said that I'm not trying to take back your pain every day in a way that won't make your heart start beating again.

I wonder if those butterflies ever drank up the nectar from your blood, probed their soft tongues into the velvet of your cuts, those razor blade ribbons, oh holy romantic, how you bleed like Mozart and bleed like ballads of classic rock stars, how they whip your face with sour sweat and drugs and drugs and drugs until you find yourself half asleep, brain swept under the rug.

Did you know only 1.5% of drug overdose related suicide attempts are successful? Beautiful blonde martyr for an ugly catholic high school in an ugly state in the ugliest of its hearts, how does it feel to be 1 in 100? How does it feel to be a rarity, carbon pressed into diamond? How does it feel to be cry for a week, left in the grass to roll like waves, buried without a name and a face and a grave?

In the latest of solemn sleep deprived nights I press my ear to the chest of the 100th depressed boy I come across and don't feel Vicodin climbing up his arteries, don't feel Klonopin, OxyContin, Ibuprofen. I can't seem to find the one, who knows, maybe you were it and all my efforts really were wasted. All those nights I've stayed up late did nothing. All those knives I stole, all that blood I wiped away with t-shirt sleeves, all the blankets I've put around stupid shaking shoulders, all the bittersweet will this be the last time your skin is this warm hugs, God did they mean nothing at all?

I lock my jaw into a permanent silence, buy back time by putting my money where your knife is. I take bets on when someone will die next. I read the label on every bottle of Xanax. I roll over in my bed again and again, and try to put you to rest again.

Amen.

I wrap my head around
the softness I feel for the
curve of your shoulders
covered by a blanket-
my comforter.
I think of your thin fingers
around a mug
of hot chocolate.
You're humming to the tune
of something we both recognize.
Snow falls like angel wing feathers,
drifting light to the earth
like I always imagined it.
Just like I always imagined it.

Stay in bed
Sometimes turning to my right
Until I close my eyes

I feel my face turn moonlight silvering with tears, midnight. You're off to Boston, he's off to sleep, I'm off to the last time I remember seeing my dead old friend's face, his veiny arms, my unknowing.

I can feel my heart settle into a place in my chest, not occupied for the better part of a week. I've been distracted, making choices that will probably **** me in a month's time.

Cause when I came home
I’d lost thirty something pounds

I think of your little nose, scarred legs, tiny laughter shaking your tiny body on this tiny Earth in this tiny space we exist in.

The space we exist in. I think of how small of a box I am contained to. My fingertips will never reach further than I can see.

And I won’t be nice to anyone
Because I don’t see why I should
I don’t see the point

No amount of tears will bring him back, that blood was stilled a long time ago. No amount of my effort matters anything because you're too many months ahead of me, too many heartbeats away, too many lives into it.

I just pick up and drop people like peaches- bruised, unholy sweetness, ripe. I bite my own tongue until it is bubble gum. I want to be a better person.

I've been working on it. I think you're getting me there, somehow, someway.

I won’t, I won't get clean
For the rest of my life
I won’t be nice

Playing my cards wrong like
Jim Morrison prom night bath,
lavender and drug fixings,
we all just hope I went
missing.

Sorry I only love you
until I wake up in the
morning.
I'm on and off like
sunrise sunset.

My mind is stuffed
in a box
in the attic.
I'm a heartbreak
addict.
Don't ever let me heal.

Let's see how pretty those blue eyes can

(Stop. Wait. Feel for your heartbeat. Press your hands to the warmth of your cheeks, feel them soften with the perfection of your smile. Run your hands through your hair. You're alive.)

be. Be what you see in the sun, warm and shining and all seeing and all loving. Stop lamenting for just a

(She has moved on and on and on to more and more and more and it is still less than you.)

minute. In a minute the blood from your wrist will start to look like her hair, waves tapering into split ends, feathering. Don't panic yet it's

(Sweetheart, please don't cry. I can feel it across the **** carpet surface of my tired heart. I'm aching to soothe whatever shakes you.)

not over.

Its 11:30 at night. You, lovely you, talking about killing yourself while all I picture are your loose fitting shirts and dimples.

If dying was simple, everybody would have done it.

Nobody talks about the truth of overdosing. You'll be on the floor, puddle of ***** underneath your cheek, the last meal you ever ate stuck to your face, you'll never have felt so weak in your life, even when downing a bottle of downers. Hallucinate until you suffocate on bile. Or your heart stops beating. Or your lungs breathe themselves backwards, inside out. Your brain will be alive for 3 minutes, just enough time to regret it, 100 times, outside your own cold, twitching body. Mom will find you, fall to her knees, call dad from downstairs, and black out in grief.

It's not pretty. Your funeral will be messy. People you barely remember (a girl who had a crush on you in kindergarten, the person you told you were depressed that couldn't bring themselves to listen, didn't want to believe it, the girl who taught you to cut your wrists like that) will cry over your body like it was their own. They'll feel tears soak shirt, after shirt, after skin, after shirt. They'll feel your voice on the back of their neck in cold spells and hot flashes for years. Mom will wake up from nightmares, call dad, he's drinking.

And here you are, thinking it wouldn't matter.

I picture your loose shirts and dimples and how simple it would have been to say nothing, never let you brand my heart with anything but a weeks worth of deep regret in a month or two, maybe three, however much longer you can stand heartbreak. But it's not like that, I'm stronger than that. And you are too, you are too.

No more of those beautiful boys.*

**** beautiful boys and how they
make my wrists glow blue in the nights they're pressed against the sheets, 1:00 am. Thinking of those glowing blue eyes, glowing perfectly straight teeth, their glowing blue souls, glowing blue halos, I glow into the night and keep the blue blue blue owls awake.

Angelic hoodlums and holy ones.

**** their gorgeous noses and the way the roses they give me don't melt in the moonlight like my fingertips on their gorgeous skin. I play the strings of their heart like a harp, gorgeous and gory and plucked clean like doves feathers on the gorgeous graveyard ground of my ribcage.

All those beautiful boys, tattoos of ships and tattoos of tears.

The quiet giggle I allow myself to make, the quiet way my eyes roll back at your breath, the quiet and killing way I can't see past it.

I thought I was over this last October

*No more of those beautiful boys.

I taste the pills on my tongue like Marilyn did, so pretty in life, so much prettier in death. I watch everyone around me offer up their love in homemade hashtags, I'm the next trend, pretty and dead.

Come one, come all, local girl kills herself! Actually does it! Come see, covered in her own ***** and Xanax, regret filling her lungs like balloon animals, right after the bearded lady, before the strong man, come one come all!

I think of all the people around me, inches from becoming local commodities. I think of their dimples, their veiny arms, the way they walk with their hands straight by their sides, the way they always know how to make me laugh, the way they are so alive, full veins, brain firing snap after snap, cheeks still flush and warm. I think of that gone and I cry cold tears, wipe them with cold hands, grow cold to the cold reality of "it's a part of life".

I think of something worse than heartbreak.

*& so to tenderness I add my action.

Ode to "I knew him enough to know he's a cool guy."

When a child dies, everyone feels the ripple. But, I wonder if the dog in his Instagram profile picture will miss him. I wonder if he will run to whichever monotone voice calls him again.

How life rattles on, moonlight just barely bursting through cold winter mornings, sunlight touching grass like mother's hug, flowers blushing like first grade first date, favorite songs eaten and reeaten like taffy, how laughter bubbles and pops through gapped teeth, life moves before it sinks into the ground, under the calla lilies. Everything goes quiet under the red sun. It moves silently like ghost footprint. It is gone like bone chips in fingertips.  

Cherokee rose, tell me what you know. Will he be buried with a cast on his wrist just like I remember him?

You open your jaws, wide as bone allows.
From the spaces between your teeth
people fall like blood-heavy snowflakes.
Grandmother, brother, mother, daughter,
all made up of paper-mache.
Everyone in front of you sways,
backs arched, lips curled,
curdled like milk in the summer’s heat.
They protect the fragility flying over them.
Wishing cracked and broken things whole.
They fold and tear like origami. Your
brain illuminates itself, paper lantern.
Brightening the thin walls before you.
The weightless, the worldly and the writhing.
They breathe easy.
They peer into our lungs, divulging our restlessness,
our dreaming. Only their synapses
remain, blood slick;
they bind and unbind to yours.
Consciousness ends and consciousness begins.
Consciousness ends and blood begins.
We are unholy Goddesses.
We are unholy goodness.
We are unholy and unbroken and good and God.
This is the only form of song, the pitch from our neurons,
the blood beneath our fingernails, the swaying, the swaying,
these minds and minds
and the never-ending
mindfulness. These crawling, floating,
grieving, forgiving minds.

Hey, grandpa. Well, technically, great grandpa but who has time for that many words? My hearts runnin' on empty, you see, and you know a thing or two about hearts. Do you know what time it is? If Marguerite heard me on the phone, she'd have my head. Well, let me just tell you, I haven't heard from my best friend in a month. I'm starting to think ill never be able to feel my fingers again. I'm really starting to think that I'll never be able to tell pink from gray again. I'm starting to see ghosts, grandpa. They're these big, melting wax figure, mummified soldier, lighthouse-eyed things. They smack the air with the scent of carrion and roll in the smashed jaws of a mother opossum, snaggle-toothed roadkill no one mourns. Their eyes drip puddles on the floor. You'd know something about this, right? 1943, does it ring a bell? Hey, no. You can't hang up. You're the only one who's seen this type of ghoul. If you heard the way their voices overlap and churn like the great belly of the ocean, you'd see where the twang of my heartstrings echoes. You need light, candelabras, great fire places, the first four light bulbs Edison ever spoke into existence. The sun will rise and set again, but UV light only can reach so deep under our apostate skin. Watch as the universe burns itself into place, and keeps you in the eye of all of it. I felt the subtle ghost of my hands plunge deep into my chest, and find my heart a new home.

My friend wants to **** himself. Who do I tell?

I've come to believe all life is precious. I watch each person, each interaction, each laugh and smile and sneer with such absent curiosity, I feel my brain and 7 names fall through my dry palms. I snap my gum. A girl snickers, covering her mouth, her friend grinning along.

****, he's the one with abusive parents, sometimes homeless, right?

I feel my mouth go dry, my tongue swells, balloons to the roof of my mouth, my teeth sweat and my throat rolls over. My stomach and heart switch places. Words are only sounds; they mean nothing without pattern, without memory, without culture, without hearing. Why are the things with the most power in this whole **** world so inaccessible?

Don't tell anyone. A call from the school could get him killed.

6 hours later, I look to my right, my best friend resting in my arms- asleep, tranquil, clean of bruises and the same abuses. My skin radiates warmth and worry and relief and everything that's entailed in loving someone that's always so close to the edge.

Give him my number. Good luck. Keep me updated.

Close to the edge of what? I would say God only knows, but He doesn't know everything. He has no plan. I'm the only one with a plan. I'm the only person I can trust.

6 hours later, I worry myself into my sheets and below my mattress, through the floor and foundation, cradling my head in the soft soil beneath my comfortable, quiet family home.*

Sometimes, when hope is all you have to hold onto, you find yourself holding your own hand.

God, I'll never know what rest is.
I gotta fake my death just to get to sleep.
Counting sheep doesn't do ****,
when you don't got the time.
I flip my eyelids inside out,
burning the night back into them.
I dream of dreaming and I wake up nodding off
to something like daylight.

Chloroform rag between my teeth,
just to get me to shut up,
"I miss you."
Feels a lot like cotton mouth, huh?
Feels a lot like scared kid,
like bruised back, shoulder blades,
like walking 10 miles for acid,
just so you can see things like
you're not supposed to.
But that's over.
Sweet like honey dew melon,
like honey drizzled so gently on toast, gold, it's all gold:
gold sunsets, gold hair, gold eyes, gold teeth, shining like the gold ring dad "lost" down the drain. Gold, stay gold, nothing gold can stay, gold.
Nothing gold can stay.
That's what I told myself.
And then the sunset came,
and came again,
and came 30 times
before I saw your face again.
Gold sticks to my hands like cellophane.
I watch my hair melt into a gold puddle,
waiting to freeze underneath your feet.
Hey, nothing gold can stay but
can you try?

Crack, across your cheek
I feel my bones strain and weep
Curdled like milk in the summer's heat
I rot into the earth
And myself again

Noxious air breathing, cry baby, softly weeping.
Why you babysittin only 2 or 3 shots?
I'mma show you how to turn it up a notch
God, I thought I loved you so. I should be less creepy, less easy, less up in your face, less pretty kitty in a push-up bra, less victim, less driving off an overpass, less humming in the shower, less falling apart, less in love.
Faded, drank.
I pass out counting the flecks of gold in your eyes.

Hey, Mr. Rager! Mr. Rager!
Tell me where you're going!
Tell us where you're headed!

This is an ode to all the lungs you've burnt, all the times you knew how hurt I was and am and how my heart bruises the inside of my chest, beating the **** out of me, trying to burst from my body, frantic, afraid. Oh- credit card fingers, syringe tongue, bloodiest of Sunday's, show me how to roll it, show me how to make origami of my bones.

I'm off on a adventure.*

To the fickle space between the folds of your brain, to the indecision, to the gentle curve of your shoulders that I trace with my palm, to the gaps in your happiness.

Mr. Rager!
Tell me some of your stories
Tell us of your travels
Hey, Mr. Rager! Mr. Rager!
Tell me where you're going!
Tell us where you're headed!

To the untouched spots on your cheeks, to all the noises that frighten you, to all the things that go bump in the night, to starving, to all the stucco paint, to acid flashbacks, to paranoia, to my knuckles, ****** from beating myself up.

I'm on my way to Heaven.

To the rolling back of your eyes, to ******* nosebleeds, to drunk driving, to the ***** all across your chest, to your mother's mother, to the way your eyes soften when you look at me.

Mr. Rager!
Can we tag along? Can we take a journey?

You're asleep in my arms, my hand in your hair. The world is turning a little slower.  

*When will the fantasy end? When will the heaven begin?

It's the kinda love where you're being swallowed whole.
You want to melt into their bones.
You walk them to the door,
tip-toe across the floor,
12:04.
You don't think you've ever felt like this before,
center of the sun, molten core, honey drizzled on toast.
Wash them from your hair,
check under your nails,
go to bed,
their face imprinted on your eyelids.

I don't need no arms around me.
I pretend I love anyone. I pretend to drool honey onto the paper-thin skin of things that barely breathe through their own lungs that they've smoked black and blue and filled with water and soot and ****. I pretend to care for a moment, lighting a match on my teeth.

I don't need no drugs to calm me.
I pretend you don't make me sick. I pretend this isn't some kicked puppy ****. I stare at a weakness that swallows itself whole and then swallows itself again in the eyes, sizing it up, and erasing it with 3 grams of ****. Sedate yourself in your closet for a few hours, hide beneath six layers of clothes and clean fingernails and I love you's and pretend you're ever there for me. *******, how dare you be a normal ******* teenage when I'm sitting here rotting into the floorboards? My eyes are just puddles and my hands are still wrapped around your ankles. You don't need me. You don't need anything. You'll **** yourself slowly all on your own until you're someone entirely different, someone entirely yourself and you.

I have seen the writing on the wall.
I pretend like I don't think that me running a bullet through my hot, tired brain is an inevitable thing. I pretend like I won't lose my mind down the shower drain and unzip all my veins like a child's jacket, watching the blood trickle down me like rain on a window pane. I pretend like anything anyone says is really true, that I'm *really capable of living, that I'm really not too sick to ever be normal. I watch myself fall under the tar, sink into the roadkill, mold into the fluid marks under a raccoon, it's mask ripped off and teeth poking through its nose, carrion smacking the air with rolling guts in the summer breeze. I cook myself in the sun, let the deer's belly swell around me, I make my home in its smashed ribs. I pretend like it won't end like this.

Don't think I need anything at all.
I take a razor to my stomach, watch the fat peel open and burst like canyons. I tear it out with my bare hands, thick, tepid, organic. I lay it across the floor and throw up all the pills in order. I count them out, and lay each with a separate suicide note and not in any of them, do I say my name.

No don't think I'll need anything at all.
Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

All in all it was all just bricks in the wall.
This isn't right anymore. I won't say anything anymore.

*All in all you were just bricks in the wall.

Weakness makes me
spit bile into the softly sliced sunburned bruises
of bony arms
and I lock
sympathy in the basement,
it seems to me.

Forget about all the things you know about yourself and imagine this instead

I. I touch the soft tufts of your hair along your neck and wish three times during that instant that I could take back every bruise that you have ever been given.

II. I feel my shoulder against yours, warmth beneath chaos, lying low in the gardens in our hometown. I know in that moment you will shatter every belief I have ever had about love and replace it with framed pictures of me kissing your cheek.

III. I feel your arm around my shoulder and know that this is safety. I have not been afraid in what feels like ages when I hug you, count each rib, watch your face bury in my shoulder.

IV. I love you is bottled in every stare I cast at you. I wonder where I left my mind.

I'm learning how limited forever is in the space between two hearts.

You, I feel my heart swell when I hear your name. You're like my one night stand with happiness. You make me forget how completely cold it is. You remind me what beauty is and what hope feels like, soft and tangible, floating through the air like ribbon. You show me what it means to be alive, survive, swallow difficulty whole. I can feel your palms against my soul.

You, the illegitimate child of sadness and cigarette ashes, the tasteless poison that falls beneath my teeth. I can feel my heart sinking into the soft soil of you, planting itself in the wasteland where the bones of tiny things rest uneasy.  

Please, just let me sleep in peace for once.

Nothing's gonna hurt you baby
As long as you're with me you'll be just fine

I think of how I held onto
your arm so tightly
as we crossed the street.
I said I was afraid
just so I could feel the way
your veins protrude and
your bones shake.
I just wanted to be
close enough
to feel your heartbeat.
I can feel it through the concrete now,
laying on the pavement,
watching the cars whir by
over me.  

Nothing's gonna hurt you baby
Nothing's gonna take you from my side

I wake up this morning, it's been thirty days since we last spoke. My heart has aged more than that.

I turn to my right, sighing out slowly, feeling my ligaments creak and my bones moan, put on my glasses, and have to push away the thought of you a hundred times in those few seconds. I get up and wear something you'd hate. I cry in a way you'd hate. I love you in a way you'd hate.

I wonder where you are right now and if you care about where I am.

(In case you're wondering, I'm lost in the sea of you. I'm lost in every memory. I'm lost in laying by the gazebo, I'm lost in counting stars, I'm lost in paying for ice cream, I'm lost in now-burnt-down favorite pizza places. I'm lost in sunglasses. I'm lost in sweatshirts. I'm lost in it all.)

Maybe, we're only pretty in context. Maybe this isn't what love is supposed to be. Maybe we were always all wrong.

But I don't care, I want your homemade haircuts and messed up spine and bony fingers, delicate like bluebird legs, and the way your eyes light up when you see me. I want to be where you are again, feel your arm around my shoulder again, feel your cheek pressed to mine again, feel your laughter shake me like a tiny animal in the jaws of you. I miss your chaos and disaster and starving and boy crying. I can't sleep at night knowing that you're not still wrapped in the letters you wrote me.

I'm trying to get over it, but I'm buried under the weight of it all.

Sometimes, I wonder if you miss me. I think of you whenever I try to fall asleep.
At night, the drugs give you back rubs where my hand used to be, you shaking from the echoes of your mothers screams.
You walk across the street without me on your arm, holding onto you like a lifeline.
You've let me drift, far, far out to sea.

I toss rocks up at your window
that splatter like airborne blood clots.
My eyes are red from crying.
My tongue has been ripped to shreds.
You look at me once, go back to bed.

White lines on the kitchen table.
Your head, C10H15N,
Altoids box under the keyboard.
Your heart, C21H23NO5,
Syringes up your sleeve. ***** on your chest.
Your veins, C18H21NO3,
Dropping acid like the Aztecs.
Your tongue, C20H25N3O,
What will it take to strip your blood down
to the salt and the rust?
5 more Klonopin, 5 more Xanax,
you're on the floor,
a boring story,
I've heard it before.
Keep it far from me.
(You're not close enough. Please.)