please don't take this the wrong way but
the way your face looked in the moonlight is always
at the edge of my thoughts

i don't usually say this to people but
you make me feel like an ee cummings poem
you open and close me with your smallest gesture
or texted emoticon

you know
i have a girlfriend and
she's what i need
i think, and the insistent pull of your gravity
is only a temporary thing, but
i am only a temporary thing, so i live
the knife's edge, i hold you
platonically and always say yes
to the plans you make and never
ever kiss you or even intimate that
i want to kiss you (i want to kiss you
like broken dams and rushing floods i
want to kiss you) and i tell her that
i love her
and i do but
this nova or crush or infatuation is too fleeting,
this me is too fleeting, so
i hold the fire as close as i can hold it
without burning, so close that sometimes it's hard
to breathe and i let the smoke fill my lungs because
i know it won't last

and tonight is the lunar eclipse
and that cold rock that lit up
your face so perfect
as we stretched on a blanket under the stars at the drive-in
bleeds old copper, sleeps, and

the darkening moon makes me think that the world is ending
it whispers that
this small tidal pool world of maybe-us
is ending

leaving only salt-crusted ****** rock
and the sense of having lost
something that drowns like the ocean

and i know that eclipses like this are common empty shadows --

how can so many wonders (so many full moons or sunsets
or held hands) be so ordinary?

ghosts outnumber us but
someday we will join them
looking out from plastic-strewn beaches
upon slowly boiling oceans

"I want to kiss you," she says,
"but only if you promise
I won't end up in a poem."

it's been 20 hours since the end

the hot water of an honest shower streams down my skin

she sent me a link to a youtube video
she says it's her breakup music

i click on it, but i don't listen to the words,
on account of how i'm mostly scotch tape today
from across the room, it sounds like despair

the sign at the side of the road says "right lane ends"
i yell at it "everything ends"
no one hears me

except maybe god
but god's not watching today
god's TiVoing me
god'll probably get to it later
i get it though
there's supernovas and auroras and kardashians to watch

the christians say that god knit me together in my mother's womb
all fearfully and wonderfully
i get the sense that maybe the good yarn was on back order that day
it's okay god
i also have days when i wake up late and almost miss the bus and forget my part of the group project that's due today

we got this, though

we got lots of ways to glue and macaroni up a brain just right
all this science and not enough places to stick it
i shove a handful through the blood-brain barrier and there it is
home
chemicals so sweet they make me cry glitter

it's funny how things can look the same but feel so different
when kelsey texts that we need to talk, that it needs to be over skype
it fills me with that old dread

it just takes a few words to scoop me out like a pumpkin
they don't last long, after you carve them

i want to take extra antidepressant tomorrow morning
it increases my risk of seizures but i don't care
i'm not sure how many hours i spent today
shuffling through walmart with downcast eyes
occasionally stopping to cry at a toaster or pillowcase

thirty one is mathematically prime
it doesn't feel very prime

when i get to the end of the toothpaste i know i still have time
i roll it and squeeze it and press it and
day after day this tube gives me what i need to get by until
one day it doesn't anymore
that's my thirty one

i watch the sad blue mouthwash disappear into the drain
i'm not sure why

people act like a breakup retroactively erases
all of the joy and value a relationship had
like its impermanence somehow robs it of significance

i figure every relationship ends
either in breakup or death
i don't think it makes them any cheaper

to regret anything is to wish for your own non-existence
without the steps and forking branches that brought you to here, you would be someone else
someone that your parents and best friends might mistake for you

i regret.

the sign at the side of the road says "right lane ends"
i yell at it "everything ends"

people act like a breakup retroactively erases
all of the joy and value a relationship had
like its impermanence somehow robs it of significance

i figure every relationship terminates
either in breakup or death
i don't think it makes them any cheaper

to regret anything is to wish for your own non-existence
without the steps and forking branches that brought you here, you would be someone else
someone that your parents and best friends might mistake for you

i regret

i wake up to october morning darkness crystallized under my eyes

i despise my smallness
i'm not sure what i mean by that but the feeling is thick in my bones

i wish i had more gravitas or impetus or something else sternly derived from Latin and Physics
wish i had a lever long enough to move myself, to advance the plot
i needed to do laundry three days ago. i still need to.
there is a ticket in the glove box of my car. today is its birthday. it is one week old. its name is driving-while-talking-on-the-phone-to-my-girlfriend or another arbitrary combination of shapes that represent sounds and ideas at the intersection of the nature of human contact and personal responsibility.
i don't know because i haven't read it yet

i think i could probably be more than i am
(more what?)

it's hard to remember which day it is
they all sound like cars driving past my apartment and a bathroom faucet that always drips
relativity says that everyone else is moving and I am perfectly still
october is when relativity first opens its autumn flower self
some time in april I will pick its rotting blossom from my skin

i remind myself that lots of streams have dormant times when thirst exceeds ability,
that even great rivers sometimes choke with silt, reduced by so much minutiae
that it just takes a change of season to set things right again

i am waiting for rain