You are adrift.
Like a brilliant green leaf that forsakes its branch and floats on the air,
Intricate and carefree.
The winds change, and you travel the world.
You flit from flower to sky, twist and dance.
You don't know where you're going.
You don't need to.
And me...
Well, I'm a river.
I press the ground.
I know where I am, and I know where I will be.
Nothing stops my course unless it is
Catastrophic,
Cataclysmic.
Nothing sways or bends me
Unless it is a force of Nature.
I am heavy- I bore into the earth,
Carve a path agonizingly deep and slow,
But I rush along it even though I know it leads to more of the same.
Many things pass me,
Many things touch me.
But when they touch, they stay.
They are swallowed up inside me,
Drowned at the bottom of my passion,
Swept into me and carried forevermore.
For although it takes a lightning strike to change my course,
It takes only the lightest caress to change my anatomy
And make me new.
My bones are in the riverbed,
Cold and clear, my veins rush and eddy, stretching their fingers to tangle in the treeroots,
And if you but touch me for a moment,
You are in my blood.
You scare me, because we are different.
I feel the wind when it picks up,
It kisses my face and I kiss back,
But I always stand my ground,
Even when I might desire the freedom of surrender.
It is my way:
I am a river.
Seeing you wheeling in the sky,
I am afraid.
If you follow an errant gust or passing draft
Far away from me
And over the green hills,
I cannot yank my skeleton from the ground
And uproot my veins from their stranglehold on the dirt
To follow you in your flight.
I can only watch, gouged into the soil,
As you float closer and farther away,
Land upon my rushing pulse and leave ripples that reverberate
Long after you have peeled away to investigate some new breeze.
You spin away again, here and gone,
Close and distant,
And I remain, here in the ground, pounding with the pulse of permanence.

He was angry because the boy with glasses and a gamer shirt had told me he wished he had a girl like me.
It’s not you, it’s me. And the fish bowl that was twice the size of your head.
Punching the wall, I knew
jealousy was a
understatement.
it crawls under your bed and waits until it is four in the morning and you have nothing left
Except tears and yearning for something different,
yet you know you cannot have anything different,
because the thought of mornings without him,
and the thought of phone calls absent of his vocals
makes you want to rip open your ribs until you color his
freckles.
He was angry because he was threatened,
and it was so stupid, so animalistic.
I am not territory, not a tree you lift your leg to mark on.
I am a human, a human, a human, I just want to be
loved.
the door broken, his lips bleeding,
he kissed me until I thawed.
his shoulders shook as he cried and cried and cried,
please be mine, please be mine, please be mine.
jealousy is what we romanticize about,
yet it is the monster we will
become.

My sweater smells like cigarette smoke.
When I got out of the shower
I put it back on.
It's funny how things evolve.
That scent used to mean cold nights
And neon lights,
A crowd of people full of piercings and my dad's silhouette ahead
Pushing through the crowds on St. Marks,
Lungs full of thick second-hand soot,
Heart full of excitement and love for my city.
It was a tunnel of smoke I had to get through fast,
And I would hold my breath that entire street,
Not wanting the burn of it in my mouth.
As I got older it also started to mean
That my best friend had found a new way to hate herself.
I noticed a sourness to it,
Something that hurt my throat,
Like the feeling right before you cry.
I never did like cigarette smoke.
To me it meant
A gruesome marriage of death and the desire to die,
A ****-you to a world whose clarity amazed me.
I never liked cigarette smoke.
And then I met you.
And now here I am, with a bit of it clinging to my sweater,
Comforted by burying my face in the soft fabric
Because the fragrance reminds me of you.
Funny, how things can change so completely.
Whenever I smell smoke, now, I think of you,
And I have noticed that the scent itself has changed
Into a richer one, like incense.
It's funny what loving someone can do,
Huh?