I keep trying to convince myself that I’ve mustered enough strength to stand up, take a breath, and move the **** on with my life,
content and resolute in knowing that you can’t be a part of it any longer;
I keep trying to convince myself that it was all a bad
(and exquisitely decadent)
dream, that none of it actually happened, that you were precisely those last terrible words, and nothing else;
I keep trying to convince myself that I never loved you,
that I do not still love you…
And yet all the while I can’t muster enough strength to stand up at all;
I balance and wobble on shaky stilts for a brief bit of time, sure, distract myself with “living my life” and “letting you go” and
finding peace amongst the heartbreak, but I am too clumsy to keep abreast for long—
the end of my shoes clip and snag onto memories of sweet nothings, and
I fall all over again as if it were for the first time;
I fall and hit the ground with a smitten, dazed smack of my head to the pavement,
and at first I’m numbed with pleasantries, with the tender memories and harmonies that used to put me to sleep with a smile so stupid it wouldn’t wipe away,
but then the stars clear
and I’m trying to bite back the smarting with fallacies over my decidedly pragmatic indifference, and in my not-yet-pained stupor,
I can almost breathe a mechanical sigh—
can almost get swallowed up by sheer lack of sensation—
and extract a salvation out of my own emotional etherization and find satisfaction amongst the numbness…
I can almost move on if I don’t feel at all…
But I don’t have any reserves of Novocain or morphine, and after I’ve fallen,
the pain always returns.
I keep trying to convince myself that what you told me was true,
that you weren’t ever real,
that you weren’t ever real,
but that contemplation is destroyed the minute it enters the recesses of my darkened cognizance, and I can never revere over a single ******* moment of my day without
something of you
making its unsolicited entrance;
you were always real.
I don’t know;
I just want something positive to come of us, still;
I still hope all the while we are silent; I still yearn all the while we stay distant—
“independent”;
you still are the victim of my fantasies all the while within my head I lament,
praying that I’ll find contentment,
and that for a small while you are only just taking rent
elsewhere, and will soon miss me enough to say that leaving me is never
what you meant of it…
Call me excessively self-indulgent and masochistic for all the
emotional ballistics and disconsolate pyrotechnics
but I’m convinced that the last five months can be validated with a
simple romantic fix of all of this:
for you and I were too explosive not to make sense;
there’s too much that’s been felt,
too much harboring under my doting starry-eyed belt,
too much over which you’ve made me melt.
All I’m asking for is your help.
I surely didn’t imagine you,
I didn’t imagine that warmth that so affectionately looms,
didn’t imagine the luminescence of the moon,
didn’t imagine the connection between us two…
I suppose what it is that I’ve been trying to say, what all along I’ve attempted to convey,
is that I miss you:
Please come back to me, Mr. Blue…
I really ******* miss you.

I listened to your latest rap, and
how terrible I feel for loving it so much.
How terrible it is that the only raps in which I am the muse are of broken hearts and tragedy.
How terrible it is that I think this may be more beautiful than what I had with you this time last month.
You said you were getting over me though, and
I’m struggling to grip onto reality, for my hope is blinding
me too dramatically and my heart wants so desperately
to not believe you.
I can’t afford to let you go,
not to my core,
for fear of letting my feelings harden anymore,
over this.
We’re both volatile, but what we’ve shared was
real.
You are real.
And I feel that you’d told me otherwise,
fed me some scrambling apologetic lies,
over the sake of granting each other freedom—
pseudo-altruistic *******, trust me, love, I didn’t need ‘em.
I didn’t ask that you’d set me free,
merely that you be with me;
it’s just you I need.
But I will wait, because neither of us has really said
goodbye,
and I don’t doubt that those parting words will die
before they ever reach one another, and after waiting,
I will try,
again.
But until then,
at least I’ve made you feel something.
At least you’ve made me feel something, and
how terrible I feel for loving it so much.

He's like sunlight
and whenever I think of him under the cover of the night
my eyes have to squint because
in my heart it gets so bright—
so much so the love's impossible to
fight
because it all feels so right
anyway,
and why fight it
when I can just ride it,
S'not like I mind it
or attempt to hide it;
the romantic in me is promptly ignited
and all the sensual candles are lighted,
forming a trail to my heart, you're guided—
I'm so madly in love that even when
I lay alone
at home
my mind always roams
to the sun rays that always'd shone
just how far up the wings from my heart—
having let myself flown—
He's like sunlight
and even at night
my room grows so bright
that I can't even sleep,
but I've no reason to weep
for I'd rather stay awake
and think of all the love there is to take
and cultivate—
His rays've kept me warm,
our love, unconditional, albeit occasionally forlorn.

The power went out in my house for the first time tonight.
It took only but a moment for everything to run loose from my hold and to leave me empty handed and
sightless.
It was as sudden and unpleasantly startling as the moment I realized I’d
fallen in love with you
and now these vaulted ceilings and smart, leather couches have fallen
victim
to the same darkness that shrouds my breaking heart.
I think you’re really selfish.
But so am I,
and as I hide in the blackness with the amber haze of
candlelight
casting those flickering shadows of
twisted, dancing demons on the walls I am hearing their exaggerated whispers hastening me to resent you for it.
They intoxicate my head about how you’re probably being
more selfish than me.
For god sakes you sent me a short story
laden and sodden and dripping
with all of these beautiful similes and thoughts and they were
horrible.
Not only were they not written for me, but for some
replacement muse
who has beautiful green eyes (are not mine, any longer?) and a beautiful smile (have I stopped grinning at you? I wonder now how it is I lost your love.)
that conquered your heart and blasted past my deafening, mundane
inadequacy.
You say you love me
You say you wish you’d say it more
You say you love me so much.
But the demons scoff at you—they’re telling me you’re lying.
O the lies! Liar! Clever devil, that one! Don’t believe those sweet things! they admonish with a brutality that entices me to scream out loud at you,
to shout and yell and kick and scream out loud because
how dare you do this to me?
Why love me at all
When your muse beckons with her beautiful, superior, faultlessness and tempts and tantalizes and
replaces me?
You say you love me so much.
And I, you, Darling.
But it’s too dark in my house and it’s too dark in my head and it’s too dark in my heart
And you have a new muse.

How is it
that I all too frequently find myself
poring over contemplations and fantasies to conjure my passion for you into writing,
that I have an entire section of poems, memoirs, and undelivered letters addressed
to you, for you, of you,
that I hurl myself into the vast, ever-encompassing depth of my loyal infatuation in the name of upholding and preserving
that special love
we discovered inside one another,
that I would gladly spend another nine (plus) hours hiding in my room if it meant I could reserve exclusively that time for you,
and you haven't even written that song for me like you promised?
The haikus are nice, my lovely,
but all too brief and it isn't even like you spend much time on those measly seventeen syllables of cheese anyway;
you don't make me feel significant enough and I'm just
pining quietly for you
while standing in the shadow casted by my affectionate regards of who you are and who I wish I could
dedicate my life to.
I may be just being too bold, too brash, too needy... But it isn't like I haven't tried to distract myself
from this eager, burning drive
to spend every conscious (or otherwise) moment wishing myself to be transported into the safe house that is your arms and chest and heartbeat...
I try.
Still, as I write to you, I am trying.
But my heart forbids I forget lest it tries to rip itself up again, and I'm not strong enough to call its masochistic, suicidal bluff.
All of this fluffed and heart-shaped confetti,
all of this gift-wrapped, glittery dedication,
all of this sugar-coated and caramel-dipped sentiment...
All of this, all of this, all of this,
and still
You haven't even written that song for me like you promised.

My nails dig
into the skin on my arms
when I let myself think over what you've become to me:
your eyes are the needles I stick everywhere into my veins,
viciously, selfishly, fiendishly,
begging you look me over, once, twice, thousands of times in all the unused, neglected spaces.
I yearn to inject everything, anything you have the grace and generosity to grant unto me--
to shoot up and float away--
so that as your love pulses through my bloodstream and dilates my pupils I can revel in the explosion of sensation and sentiment that has too long lain dormant in the chambers of my heart.
Your voice puts shivers down my spinal column, drawing with the softest touch a line from its base
to the baby hairs at my neck,
It churns the contents of my abdomen slowly,
the intense heat
creeping
in a motion like the currents within the core of the Earth:
liquid heat rising,
cooling, falling, heating,
rising again--
a cycle by which ignites a white-hot fire from the depth of my being by which no other soul has managed to awaken before yours.
I'm so
terribly, helplessly, uncontrollably
addicted to you, my Darling.
You've become quite the drug to my ever-craving palate of desires,
and to go too long a time without that appeasement, the undeniably luxurious romantic gratification by which you so masterfully exude
for me
is to refuse the dregs their drugs
and I cannot fall into withdrawal again.
My nails dig
into the skin 'round my head
tearing out hair
because I've gone mad over you.

I’m quite disappointed in myself,
because all I ever have to show for my supposed beloved writings can be chalked up to a pile of sugar-coated, overly-analyzed, exaggerated, (quite pathetically so!) melodramatic infatuation from a stupid girl who casts a boy as her sun in her ever-revolving solar system of sentiments.
It really is quite pathetic,
because I am a deep, competent, sentient human being with opinions and revelations and insights on volumes of topics because I always seek out knowledge and I always attempt to dig deeper into the story than a mere brush against the surface.
And all you ever get to know of this deep, competent, sentient human being with opinions and revelations and insights is that she wants to feel the love from someone other than her platonic fistful of friendships at every measurable instant of her existence.
I contemplate the pursuit of happiness. Life after death. The reasons people must always justify themselves for doing what they want. Aliens. Occular dominance. The breeding rituals of sea slugs.
And all that I actually get down onto the pages is how the curve of his smirk sends me swooning seven years into the future.
But ******, I have something to say
Yet would you know that by peering into my journals? Read up on one of my latest poems—go on ahead.
It’s still about a boy.
They all are.

Floating beneath the brilliance of the full moon, I'm shooing away the wispy dark tendrils of sleep, swatting at the lazy tired gnats who are as directionless as I am.
I scrub away the hints of sand from the corners of my eyes and yawn wide enough so to dispel the collection of retiring bats who've claimed sanctuary in the cavern of my ribs.
I've without a purpose other than to carry on with my meager, passive existence in this dark limbo of twilight.
"Go to sleep silly"
As if you sensed from five thousand miles my nocturnal habituation of lethargic solitude,
As if it pierced the air like the dull green blinking at the end of the dock over on East Egg, calling out to you like a tiny beacon of distant opportunity--a lighthouse in the tremulous sea nights of--yes--your own affections and desires emanating back to you.
And all at once, I feel an eternity of connection tethering me back to my plot of soil, somehow not as empty and cold as it felt before.
Because you somehow knew, and that somehow makes my meanderings less of a thing to dwell with, for somehow someone somewhere cares if my soul is restless.
So I'll probably end up going to sleep.
After all, I'll find you again in my dreams.

I have half-written confessions about you
And all of them are simultaneously as weak and gauche as the struggling flight of a butterfly with half its wings ripped off.
I have no coordination when it comes to dancing, Darling, and it's probably becoming more and more prevalent as you catch me tripping around my declarations
Because I am filled with so much self-doubt, but I can't help it that this new piece of my life has me second-guessing the placement of my feet and the rhythm I'm swaying to.
And with you being so honest from the dawn of our affair, it's made me guilty for doubting anything at all.
But I can't help it that you're a natural dancer and I'm just a mess.
I felt that the strength in my emotions were something to be ashamed of and in turn I've put them on display
A lewd circus performance to weigh the mass of my words and predict the approximate level they could wriggle down beneath your skin
Because I can deal with the stern looks and careless scoffs from sporadic digital strangers,
It's just that you aren't one and that means your opinion counts most of all.
I want to dazzle you with crazy dance moves like the Charlie Brown or Jitterbug or even twerk a couple of times because I can't impress with my mastering of the Hokey Pokey and the Cha Cha Slide
But I digress;
It just seems that all I can talk about when you're not around is how swell it'd be if you were.
And making our sweet dancing anything but comprised of candlelight and champagne and red roses just insults the beautiful parts of myself I want to so desperately share with you.
I'm no poet, dude,
And I've got no graces in dance,
But I'll rearrange the constellations in the sky to help better express myself if it meant figuring out how I managed to fall in love
With you

It's all been soiled like some overused sponge stinking of mildew and the precise antithesis of the cleanliness it was meant to produce.
It took but a second for my overly-romanticized secret affair to be shoved into the bottom of the garbage disposal and minced over and over by the thunderous roar and bite in the throat of the sink, and good ******* lord I felt every grind and tear slicing up my entrails and leaving me gutted and panicked on the kitchen floor.
This is why he, and every other precious charm sparkling in the trove of my heart belong locked away in a safe and hence buried at the deepest trench that can thus even only be located by the swiftest of explorers.
I should have known you to surpass qualifications in navigating the turbulence (there be none for you, probably, anyway) and disarray that is the ever-winding contour of halls and trap-doors within the chambers of my heart.
You're too sly to just float along the surface to the tempo of my shallow praises in that scarlet inner tube and work on your tan from the UV Rays emanating from the warmth of my I am happy smiles,
No, you're unsatisfied lest you've overturned every lingering mystery and lighted the sad, empty shadows that I had humbly darkened so to preserve the pathetic weaknesses and guilty pleasures that I hide inside them.
I'm sad that you think that with that necessary darkness comes malice, because I've never had an honest evil wish for even the scaliest of serpents.
But now you know that for yourself, and you knowing is the same as five billion men and women hearing and seeing and discovering at last the very unremarkable and demeaning secrets of my heart.
I'm going to try to be okay with this, so all the while please,
if you can manage,
try to be okay with me and my "lie".

It's rather unfair of you, you know,
Evoking such profound sentiments from my flighty soul as if you can just waltz into the lion's den, chair in hand, and whip at the air in the rather unlikely hopes that the lioness in me bends.
Only that I do.
It's rather unfair of you, you know,
That you can charm your way through my barriers like you have, and tell me things that rip the rest of the world away, leaving you and I on a cloud waltzing slowly through your quiet, scientific romancing
And then pull away at a moment's notice because you're the one holding the whip, and I'm left alone in a dark cave with my thoughts reverberating back at me against the cold stone, with you likely under the presumption that I miss you.
Only that I do.
I've found too severe a necessity for the moments traded in the little world we've fashioned for each other. Your voice resonates like a song from my past, a familiar tune I've forgotten the words to, and yet I am sure that I've listened to it many times before. It melts in my veins like a sickly-sweet resin, thickens my blood into honey, and heats my cheeks with an excitement I've never known.
I don't know why it is that I must love you,
Only that I do.

A lot of things in my life go missing
I lose phones
Pencils
Chapstick
I do a lot of missing, too
I miss brothers
Holidays
Fashion trends
I should have known that I'm to be doing a lot more missing
Since you came around
I'm very glad I sought you out, nonetheless,
And now, it seems,
Every moment spent without you
Still has everything to do with you
Your absence constantly plagues the forefront of my mind like some
Sick craving that I've let walk into my home and cuddle next to me on the sofa
At night I'm spooning with reruns of our conversations
Pausing and rewinding the parts that put that swooping feeling back into my stomach
Like it did when you said
You think you could love me, too
And I know, Darling,
That we're supposed to be carrying on:
******* the marrow out of life
Fulfilling our days with excitement and adventure
But I've realized that there's no living anything
Lest you're part of my everything
And at weak moments like this
When I'm doing more than my fair share of missing
I'm also kind of hoping
That when I'm not with you
You're still missing me, too

I'm not going to write about you in my journal
Because unfortunately I feel that that form of confession tends to backfire dramatically and leave me jinxed.
It's like those ink-stained secrets wrapped up in leather counteract the decadent visions I drift to sleep with at night
And so,
No
I'm not going to write about you in my journal
You see, I care about the concept of you far too deeply to chance our lingering moments on teenage whimsical compulsions to gush in secrecy
About the way your words shifted my anchored soul,
About the flooding in my heart when you bared yours,
About the mass amounts of internal riots
(The butterflies doth protest)
Of your pragmatic, flirtatious adequacy
Nay, mastery.
No
I'm not going to write about you in my journal
For fear of risking those moments of substance:
Secret-swapping
Joke-exchanging
Soul-bearing times where I wanted nothing more than to jump eight hours ahead so that I could see the undigitized blue of your eyes and feel the ends of my nerves explode off my skin like the Fourth of July.
How is it
That physical proximity has nothing to do with the closeness we seem to share?
I feel
Compelled
by some unexplainable piece of mind to insist and hope and wish that
Like you once told me under volumes of conversation,
We are connected.
I don't want to waste any of this enigmatic familiarity and sudden interdependency
On matters of my own private indulgence
And for this,
I'm not going to write about you in my journal
For you say that you are Atheist
But I know that you meant it when you told me
Your soul knows mine.