You filled me to the brim with all your tendencies to fly
To put my head in places somewhere deep inside the sky
And maybe I'll return to you a bigger dreamer still
I'll whisper something pretty to forget that I am ill
I'm sick for all the moments I spent looking through your thoughts
When you would lay beside me and the world would be forgot
I haven't been this tired since I fell asleep in you
Enough with all the flying and with all the thinking too

Love someone who you cannot even
look in the eye:
it's not the demons in their self
but the way they make your heart
skip two beats instead of one
and maybe the realization that
they need not more than one look to know
you have already decorated a heart shaped room
in your ribs for them to find their home.

That's all they'll need to know
how once they let you in
you'll overstay
and lose your mind every time
their footsteps echo in the silent soundbox
of your conscious.

We don't talk of storms when they aren't already there;
if they can't fix you up,
they'll teach you how to ache instead,
and perhaps I'll learn to forget how to
give myself away in my smiles
and scribbles.

and scribbles.

I watch you breathe
as you sleep.
I'm afraid of what
you could mean
to me.

I study the stripes
on your shirt.
I think of all the
ways we'll flirt
and all the ways
we'll cry and I'll choke
with your hands
around my throat,
and Malboro Black
cigarette smoke
pouring down my
esophagus--
I wish I wasn't
so fond of us.

Love is for tin birds
in a flame cage.

Years later,
I let you see
the poems I
wrote about you
and you held them,
a tight, unbinded
book in quivering
hands and you
you didn't smile
and you didn't
thank me,
you just stood there
with your weak
brown eyes
and your strong fingers
and you took in my
attempts of
remembering you,
writing you like you were.