I am lost under ten feet of hurt
Thrown in the deep end, to learn how to swim
Or more likely, how to drown
With the last sigh of my tired life
Now sliding between my teeth
Those shiny molars that never did me any good
That drop of blood stuck permanently to my lower lip
Trembling
Under the weight of it's own existence
I taste the salt and it's familiar
Like sunburns and childhood
Like beach sand and mounting anxiety
All blooming now before my eyes
This skin I wear, this face I adorn
Crack at the first sign of tremors
Fault lines rip down my spine
And rubies run down my skin
What destruction has been caused, what hell has been raised
All by some omniscient force hiding just over the skyline
Blame those smiling pharmaceuticals
Who in seventeen years, did not once print a warning label, a DO NOT ENTER, a DEAD END ROAD
Who in seventeen years were happy to lend me a life jacket with one hand while tying me to an anchor with the other
But when I look down at my hands,
The evidence is evident,
The facts are gory, the proof is red:
Fingernails are stained with my own blood.

Five thousand trees between his knuckles
Crushing the bark, choking the oaks
Straining through leaves with makeshift sieves
Angling to find an ankle or two
Praying that even a toenail would do
But all to be found was her mountain laurel crown
Still tangled with strands of burnt-birch down

Rise,
You told me,
From that cold horizon of slumber I so often fall beneath.
I feel myself cooling
Down
Until I am just ready to collapse, thoughts becoming denser by the second,
Thoughts flying through the darkness with no sense or purpose, too far from their source to return home.
Instead they are joined to you in all you vastness,
You in all your gravity that can be felt from across the universe,
Hell, from across the room,
And suddenly the image is not so blurry.
You rise,
And so I must follow, though the sheets may plead me not to go. The coldness is swept away with the dust, my own personal nebula floating, waiting until it can form once more above my pillow.
Yet there you are again,
Luminously patient, bringing the warmth back to my bones.
And I, in all my atrociousness, bend back your ear with the woes of the evening. How numb I have become. Letting the birds of sorrow nest in my hair and demanding no rent. How dreadful I have been, losing my way in the abysmal labyrinth of my mind while you were gone. And through it all, there you are
Smiling,
Not believing for a moment that you are the center of my orbit, my reason.
And so I rise each morning, letting your warmth become my own.
I can stand tall at noon, my shadow behind and not within me.
I will fight to return home at night, afraid of what that world holds. But as things rise,
They must fall,
Only to be resurrected by the daylight.
This you remind me as you tuck me into bed, my atoms all in place, my mind at rest, as you whisper softly in my ear:
“You are like a book that I could never finish”.

I remember the first time that you reached through the sea
To grab me by the wrists
I was like sulfur  in your lungs
But your coughing always sounded more like laughter
That was a long time ago, and now
My spine is broken across the coast
My parts are spread along the shore

I will surely drown with the incoming tide
(so mine will be a watery grave)
And yet this is not my Motherland
I was born
In an estuary, brackish and confused
I was born
In the empty acid of your stomach
Fated to be nothing but a hunger pain

It is here that I will die
With the water already around my knees
I think that they will like it that way
It will remind them of something literary
And tragic

My life is being expended one word at a time
And there is not a page left in the dictionary

I hope that you kept all of those letters, and
I hope that you caught enough of my love
Pooled between your fingers
Because now
My eyes are set on the horizon
And I was never a swimmer

I wish that I could carve my apologies onto the backs of your hands, so that you may never forget the way my voice echoed between the sheets.
You've burrowed a space between my ribs, leaving a crater for your voice to whistle through when you're gone.
It is the song that plays as my breath rasps in and out of tired lungs like crumpled old origami.
The lines are no longer sharp. A haze, nondescript and uninterested. I breath out years of dust and dandelion corpses.
The floor is littered with their forgotten wishes.
I am just like so many of them, a single pasted flower in a house full of torn wallpaper.
We were thrown into the formaldehyde of the universe without an instruction manual, left alone with our confounded parts.
I am one of the puzzle pieces mixed up and misplaced, addicted to the feeling of bleeding.
I tear and tear, hoping to find answers spreading across my skin.
But you hold my hands tightly and bandage my wounds.
You quiet those impulses, numb those itches.
Medicated kisses across my elbows and eyelids.
You fill the space between my ribs.
There are words on your lips, and they say that we are going home.