I am now a diamond
Who misses her mountainous mine
Back when she was coal
Back when she was coated in soot
Back when she loved a miner
Who only loved her potential
Who ushered into caves yellow birds to find her
Who used a light fashioned on a hat just to see her
Who pick axed away at her bed
Until he held her in his hands
As softly as would a flower
Who died to make her
Her ash underneath his fingertips
Her worth a blinding sparkle in his eye
She thought he would use her for heat
That she could power his body
And warm his soul
So she let him set fire to her
She let him press into her so tight
She mistook it for closeness
And the stress
The heat
The fire of it all
It make her crack her dark amber
Striped her of her soot coat
Leaving her naked and clear
A diamond
Now a spectacle of her mistrust
On display for the world to see
Placed on the finger of another woman
That the miner actually loved.

I think you should love a girl that writes
Live her many different imagined lives
In her vast collections of created worlds
Find her somewhere buried beneath them all
And when you find her pressed between
Scribbled pages and coffee cups filled with pens
Kiss her ink black fingers
Let them stain your lips so when she looks at you
She won’t forget
You’re the hero her books are about.

I think if you would let me
I’d treat you like the night sky
I’d bundle up all of your wonderful traits and perfect flaws
And I’d create a constellation for them
I’d look at it with my telescope endlessly
And I know you don’t see yourself
The way I see you
And you still sometimes argue with me when I call you wonderful
But know that all of the things that you can’t stand about yourself
Are the very things I never want to go a day without
But if that didn’t work
Just know that if you let me I’d build you an observatory
Made of one hundreds mirrors
Each facing your direction
Just so you could see yourself up close in a million ways
I’d make you sit in front of them  for hours
Just so I could prove it to you-
That all of the other constellations
Every single one in the night sky
Will never have stars that shine
As bright as you do.

Never be afraid to make me laugh
Even if over time I ask you to stop
And I tell you you’re making me look older
Just brush that off.
I really do love the wrinkles that you’ve put around my mouth
And when I look at them I see tiny quotation marks
That remind me of all the things I have to say
And that all of those things I say are important enough
For you to quote me on
And as more time passes and those tiny wrinkled quotation marks
Get bigger and bigger and start to blend together around my lips
They’ll look more like parenthesizes
And I’ll really, really love those too
Because they’ll remind me that when I used to have to say, “I love you”
I’ll know that I love you is always implied.

The apple tree is far too honest with its harvest
Whereas a lime tree relies more on faith
A droll kind of tree
One full of doubt
She examined the fruit
Some were ripe and some were rotten
She felt nervous with the truth
It was hard to tell which from which
Without plucking that lime from a switch.

What of the nights?
What of the time God spent in-between days of creating?
What of the eighth day?
When did God sense that the ethereal rush of completing a project
was wearing off? Does God get bored?
Does he, like everyone else, grow tired of the mundane and of the usual?
God, forever only projecting his image onto his creations was no longer exciting enough.
Too lonely was God and too curious he was to be left unattended-
with the power to elude the impossible.
Too lonely he was, too much he wanted to be around others like himself
too much time had he spent with his own thoughts
reverberating off the walls of his own making,
shouting back feelings already known to him.

Too curious he was to not see what would happen
if he could experience the company and love of others like himself
and too insightful he was to know all of these things existed in his mind
but not as a firsthand account.
Too self-aware he was to not understand that a genuine account of such feelings
was what he wanted.
He felt all the feelings we feel
Curiosity
Loneliness
Boredom
Companionship
and love.
He understood them so completely and totally in the world he created
that he grew tired
and then the only feelings God could sense were those of loneliness and of guilt;
a strong undying feeling of regret for feeling things that only he has ever felt.
With these thoughts encircling his heavy mind he also realized
that if he were to create another like him, he could not control it.
His identity would have to be shared with another complete equal.

Could he have this?
Too wise he was to not account for the repercussions of his artistic actions;
God was still.
For God like all of us, wishes to be special,
to be unique, and to have control; control, the original ***** of God.
God realized this after the night of the billionth fifth day;
he realized that now after looking at the last of all his great creations
the problems with the ones before
because after all this was not God’s first week
and in no measurable time he had created many
planets, worlds, kingdoms, and beings
none holding his attention long enough to not create the next.
So these, he muttered in his kingdom of unshared silence
these had to be different.
Not God enough to oppose him but human enough to feel him.

Brother, in my dreams you have always just died.
I’ve never dreamt you are still talking to me
nor are you many years gone
your absence is always known, fresh, and painful
it feels like a skinned knee
stinging red and raw and with every movement
It reopens and spills out more and more pain.

Sometimes I am at your funeral
I’m talking through tears about the things you loved
listing off:
longboarding
reading books
long conversations
a good beer
and I stop at me.
How much you loved me, how much we were alike
and our one difference-the size of our hearts.
Mine, a tiny fragile thing with room enough
only to house you and
you, who had a heart so big
your body couldn’t let it live.

It couldn't keep breathing without making your blood thinner
so that it could more easily pass through that
giant beating ***** of yours
such thin blood that kept you alive just long enough
for you to feel every bit of pain and every moment of sadness
that having such a big heart always brings
every sad thing I feel in my dreams.

Brother, I'll say to your corpse
remember that time you were drunk
so drunk that when I told you we were out of ice
you started sobbing
you sobbed on the ground and you screamed so loud,
and you said, “but where will the penguins live?”
I laughed at you, I picked you up off the floor
and I told you, “They can live with us and I’ll pay their part of the rent.”
Then I whisper to you, softly enough
So that the congregation won’t hear
I love you more than you loved everything
Even penguins.

The moment I saw you
it was if
I had never seen another woman in my life
like all the other women
I had known before
melted into one person
and quietly stepped out the backdoor of my memory
I was aware both by the amount of children in the world
and the amount of drinks being bought by other men at bars
that there were in fact other women
but not for me, the moment I saw you
they all became faded images in someone else’s head
and in mine there you were, and still are, clear as day
standing with drink in hand, mouth moving
and there I was, and still am, waiting for them to stop
just so I can kiss them
like I had, and have, never seen lips before

I loved her body
And I used it up
The parts I liked
I drank up with a fever
Of thirst
That left her
Dry and frail
And I would have felt bad
If I wasn’t so
Dry and frail
When I met her
And now I suppose she’ll
Go
And find someone else
Whose parts she likes
And after that we’ll both be hydrated enough
To look at the parts we aren’t so fond of.

There is a sort of romance one can find at a bar
A mysterious sense of love
Removed from everyday life
From work or phone calls home
If you close your eyes you can hear it
The clacking of ice-cube
The clacking of glass
The slow pour of a beer
The faster swish of it being
Slid down to your hand
Bumping once or twice on the uneven wooden surface
The slightly cold drip running down the side of your glass
These sounds are romantic
Hemmingway wrote at a bar
Odds are your parents feel in love in one
First kisses and embraces with friends you’ve missed
They happen at a bar
If you close your ears you can see it
A dingy light from over head
A spotlight for a pretty girl’s smile
The colors that the last sip of whisky
After they’re watered down with ice
The swooshing hues of red and white
Inside wine glasses from a couple a few seats down
The hand of the bartender covering yours
As you hand them their tip
And in that same second lock eyes
Before quickly looking down
A love in a life before this one maybe.
One can find romance in a bar
In the littlest of things
When paid attention to
They hold a sense of mystery.