I will always love the
Scribbling scratched out scrawls
You make, whether ink on
Paper or the
Creases on your red lips,
They whisper to me both.

i googled "is it too soon to say i love you"
(at 11:52 pm on december 18th,
64 days after i met you)
countless combinations of 26 letters behind the glaring screen
all spelled the same warnings
it's too soon
it's just lust
it's infatuation*

but i knew i loved you the day we sat in your car for 4 hours and i listened to you talk about your 1st  and only girlfriend and the countless days you wanted to **** yourself and where the scars on your back came from and how you were figuring out that nothing really matters

but even though you want to, i know you don't actually believe that
because tonight, when i collapsed completely under the weight of knowing i wasn't good enough, you were there
you let my tears stain your flannel and you repeated the same words that wouldn't mean **** if they weren't coming from you

"Amelia, everything is going to be okay."*

b e t w e e n
the 1 am drives
the office marathons
the weightless highs
the salted wounds
you became the answer to every question i'd ever asked

you left behind pieces of yourself in every corner of my subconsciousness and i couldn't escape even if i wanted to.

connect the bruises on my hips
from your suffocating grips
you can see our love story, concise but enthralling

this is the first time i've felt breathless but alive

so **** menshealth.com and cosmopolitan for telling lost, hopeful idiots like me to sit around and wait as if tomorrow is promised and keep an unmanageable, starving beast locked in my ribcage.
by the time you read this my soul will be as open as a business on black friday and the simple fact that i trust you enough to not trample my fragile self is enough of a sign that yes,
I love you.

Did you know that if the entire history of the universe was condensed into a single calendar year, writing was invented fifteen seconds ago?

The only thing that keeps me from floating away and imploding in the Milky Way was unheard of at 11:59:44 PM.

When I read this, everything made sense for the first time in twelve years.

(Twelve years ago, I was six, and six year olds don't have thoughts that cause them to question existence and the purpose of anything; seven year olds, however, can and do.)

I don't know about you, but for me, 11:59:45 PM is prime poetry reading and writing time. And that time slot doesn't close until you go to bed and wake up and do adult things and carry on emotionless throughout the day, so if you don't ever go to sleep, you can achieve a state of transparency, and consumers love seeing right through you.

This is my theory, and it's 4:56 AM right now.

the buzz is a violent truth serum
that enslaves you as its quilled pen

it requires certain demands of you  
things you cringe at upon waking

because suddenly

you've unraveled a beautiful scroll
and marked it with broken charcoal

and kissed it with a wine-stained mouth--
your stamp of drunken approval

to make sure that the one
who should never receive it

is exactly the one
who gets bit on the lips

by your alcoholic kiss
your inebriated, late night diss

I had what I thought was a brilliant idea for a poem, once, a short while ago
it crafted itself slowly up my spine and into the quietest parts of my brain where I try to spend most of my time
as I went to align wispy thought with centered, cemented object
an unavoidable task popped up that demanded my attention and distracted me from starting my piece
and just like that,
my brilliant, invisible moment in time was released back into the atmosphere
it is probably hanging around air plane wings and dreaming of things far more important than cloud stuff
I have noticed a measurable pattern akin to this idea that if we do not act on our conscious thought, it can, in a moments' notice, be whisked away from us
while we are and while we breathe and exist, that voice in our minds can come and go as it pleases
we should try our hardest to grasp what we can, maybe
or maybe we should be thankful for the pieces we are allowed to fit together into a thing called life
I don't know, I don't know
it disappeared into thin air

Perhaps I lie awake for all of those eternally sleeping.