My English teacher told me to write about you
in two MLA-formatted pages.

I didn't know how to tell her
that double-spaced words
couldn't bring me close enough to you,
or that Times New Roman
never was the right font.

No, you are of Greek constellations,
stars on the ceiling
strung from Orion's Belt.
You are a comet streaked across my
black canvas bedroom walls at midnight.

I sit by the window during those late hours
and try to write you down,
searching for the right adjectives
to describe the way my cheeks
grow hot enough to
burn paper in your presence.

I never quite nail it.

It might be because of your restless nature,
that kerosene-burning trail of light
left in your wake
as you journey toward the sun.

Take me with you one day.

Pretend that we are two doves
soaring high above trees,
finding home in each other
rather than among crumbling leaves.
Form the letter 'o' in the skies;
take me around the earth in circles
so that we may learn to love
even when life becomes repetitive.
Don't bring me home when we are
no longer suspended in the atmosphere,
no longer timeless.

Forget that clocks even exist.

Call me selfish,
but I only want your eyes
to rest upon my hands.
I suppose disregarding the hour
will force me to turn this paper in late,
but I could never turn in a paper
without an end.
And you are endless,
from the crescent moons formed
every time your eyelids shut,
to the warmth of your sunbeam laughter,
you are a continuous cycle of night and day.

With the moonlight guiding my
unsteady hands,
I search my bedroom,
looking underneath pillows
and behind old pictures
for another word to conclude this.
I stop when I hear a distant echo
that can only be your voice.
Its hollow reverberations inside my skull
remind me why I began
to lie awake so late at night in the first place.
I visit you in my dreams—
it’s the only place you allow me to find you.
Some secret chamber of my brain
must have you trapped
if I am only able to meet you there.

And that's the first time I ask myself:
what love can exist when it's all in my head?

It doesn't matter how cloudless the skies,
or how much daylight is on the horizon when I'm with you.
I will never be more than that insecure girl you see
fixated on her shoes among a group of people.
I will never be more than that girl you notice
clutching books to her body as if they alone can protect her
from the waves you create inside her chest.
I'm just an addition to the crowd,
a person occupying space in the halls,
an obstacle on your way to class.

I'm sorry for being too late.

-mp

i want you to imagine standing in the middle of an already collapsing house, and having everything suddenly flip upside down; or after years of homelessness, picture yourself being told you had somewhere you could stay for good, only to wake up just before being handed the keys. these are some of dangers of making places out of  people.

1. don't ever turn a human being into a home unless you are prepared to be evicted without warning.
2. when you start to notice their arms taking the shape of a roof over your head, you have two choices: run, or wait for it to cave.
3. if they ask you to stay and burn with them, you have the right to say no.
4. it is not your responsibility to save anyone, and it is not your fault when you can't.
5. salvaging the photos from a house fire will only re-break your heart every time you pull them out to look at them.
6. when the basement floods, hold their hand.
7. if you are not a strong swimmer, remember that the difference between love and codependence is that one of then will drown you.
8. love will never drown you.
9. i knew this from the start but let you hold me beneath the waves in spite of it, just so you could stay afloat. i can't do that anymore.
10. i don't think i'll ever set foot on your hardwood floors again, but i'll pray that someone new moves in soon.

- m.f.

i always thought
you were thru traffic
that you were just jet lag
background noise
the kiss in the rain
i've never had
but what if you aren't?
what if this
was the thousandth time
i have loved you?
what if this is just a fresh coat of paint?
what if god
keeps a handkerchief
soaked in the day we met
next to his bed?
maybe theres a reason
i reach for no one in bed
the way i would
if someone used to be there
you know, they say
the road behind us
is littered with things
we couldn't hold onto
i wonder how many times
you've slipped through my hands
like hour glass sand
do you know
how much erosion you've caused?
i heard cupid
stopped keeping count
of how many times
we came together
just to come apart again
maybe it was just a rumor
it makes me think
about how many times
i've almost had you
like if all this talk
about history repeating itself
endlessly replaying is true
i wonder how many times
things have happened already
like the time
i tried talking you
into loving me back
back fired
or the time i could have sworn
jesus & lazarus were playing chess
with my heartbeat
but it was only you smiling
how many times
have i tried to tell you
how many times
have you read this poem
how many times
have i tried not to meet you
in my dreams anymore
it's like sleep tries to warn
me of what's happening
before it does but
i keep having this dream
where i tell you bedtime stories
and each one
is a different way you die
and in every one
i can never save you
it's like you're this song
i have on repeat
and every time it starts over
i forget the words
it's like you picked up the book entitled "us"
and the back cover
said you'd leave
so you never bothered reading it
tell me you aren't
going back in that bookstore
just to do it again
or will you tell me tomorrow?
or is this the time
you don't say anything at all?
if this has all happened before
if we call it quits
before we begin
again
from the beginning
i just want to ask you
to be my fire
because i am tired
of these old lives
and i'd like to see them
burn

Allow me to explain
what falling in love feels like.
You see, the falling happens when you run too fast,
only you don't have a clue as to
what you're running from.
All you know is that your thoughts are
a little too dense and
the pace that your heart is beating at is
a little too intense,
almost as if it was ready to
detach itself from your chest and
start running a race of its own.
But you already know that
no matter how fast your feet move
they'll never be able to keep up.
Eventually you give up the fight and
when you stop you realize that you
made it to the finish line,
only it isn't a line at all and
you were never running away from anything,
not even for a second.
All this time you were running a marathon
with the one you love as the finish line,
and now that you see this it
feels like you have finally won.

-mp

Existing is comparable to being
stuck inside of a movie theater,
watching the scenes of my life
projected on a screen that is
small enough to represent the
size that I feel.

On that screen would not be a
film that is vibrant in color and
filled with hues found in daylight,
a sight that would be considered
dazzling to the average person.

A black and white motion picture
always was better-suited to my personality,
painting a more honest image of both
the darkness that rests inside me
and of the specks of white light that
sporadically interrupt the infinite canvas of
charcoaled paint that
long ago dried on the
crumbling walls of my brain.

These layers of paint keep
thickening with age
and the heaviness stopped
feeling artistic quite some time ago.
It refuses to be washed away by
compliments, or what I perceive to be
sugar-laced lies told because
spreading goodness is man's civil duty.

But if I'm being honest to goodness,
believing that the slightest
trace of beauty lives within my organs
fills me from head to toe with fear because
the beauty people often see is
the kind that is tragic and
romanticized to new extremes in the
twisted culture that we call ours.

I do not wish to be art anymore.
My life is not a movie plot
waiting to be predicted,
and my mind is not a painting
meant to be criticized.

I want nothing more than to
be whatever creation I was
placed on this earth to be,
and I need at least one person to
accept the parts of me that were
accidental and poorly designed.
I need someone to love me
despite the malfunctions of my making.

-mp

The way I look at you
must make people think you're some kind of legend.
And you are.
You're my own book of maps to the world.

In your eyes I see the future.
The person I wish to become is reflected in your pupils,
the tides of change coming together in your oceanic eyes.
Pieces of me get washed away to another shore.
Maybe they'll be rediscovered again,
and maybe they'll be lost within the sea.
The water will keep them safer than I ever could.

Earthquakes begin in the way your smile takes hold of my insides
and shakes them around, turning them inside out
until my shelter is no more than a ceiling of stars.
You've torn down the surface
and I see the world in all of its stark beauty.
An atlas is what you are, my dear,
and your maps have led me home to the world in you.

-mp

If you leave,
I won't look at the world the same.
My windows to the outdoors may be wide open now,
but the moment you take a final step out the door,
my windows will come violently crashing down,
shattering glass upon itself.
I'll view everything as if it is broken
and even though I'll try to repair it,
the shards will remain pieces of a past life
that you'll leave me forever trying to fix.

Pity my ruins
and call a repairman yourself,
but even Home Depot won't have the tools
to fix the girl with broken windows.

-mp