You begged me to read you my poems aloud but my words came out slurred from the wetness of the back of your tongue and my rolling tears I told you I could never write a poem about you because I only write about things that break my heart but you've clawed your way out of me and now you're just another empty entry in my journal

my mind is a vassal collection of thoughts to my body where my skin can't remember the feeling of your hands but my mind has an acute sense of your words

My brain is aching:

I'm not crazy I'm not crazy I'm not crazy
I remember every syllable and vowel your rotund mouth spoke I remember everything I remember everything

You always asked me why i was choosing to write about the collective 'them' over you but you chose her over me inspite of everything your lips formed

"I love the way your skin smell oh god I love it" says your darting tongue, but does her skin smell the same as mine or were you just confused that night? Because one time you told me my scent was so familiar in the back of your nasal cavity, that there was no mistaking it was me

I never thought I could write you a line of poetry because you were too good to me but I've written you a book because you're the bane of my existence and my god I can hear my blood rushing through my chest as it tightens and my airways choke up like one of your asthma attacks, and you reach for your inhaler so you can breathe but for me nothing can dissipate this feeling

I think of you with her on repeat like an all night movie marathon of my worst nightmares and how my brain mixed up what it was like to care about another human and how to tear one apart with my tongue

How does  the sunlight hit your bedsheets through your blinds when I'm not in your bed
Does it trace her body's outlines
Just like mine? And Why do I keep thinking that I see ghosts of you in my room when it's  just me walking by my bedroom mirror

I always seem to write poems about boys who broke my heart and never about my friends and I always wonder why that happens but we never did
Tell me why I'm always writing in first person an can never write about the way things smell to other people, what time my mom went to work yesterday or what my sisters do after school with their friends behind the train tracks

I'm always wondering why couples nurture one another in public but tear each other down like the abandoned shore shacks we got lost in together  and I want to ask how does she taste? Does she have coffee breathe or is it the sweetest thing his tongue has ever touched? I have this sick need to know about his mouth on hers how yours was on mine

Nothing was ever a fantasy with you and one time I hopped a boardwalk fence at 3 in the morning just to see your crooked teeth and crooked smile and i don't know if u could compare that to anything but it kind of felt like I was teetering at the edge of a cliff and didn't care if I fell as long as you were watching me

And when I think about it I really could write about the world with my fingertips but it's a deafening sound hearing my nails scrape against the paper clawing my way through your words to get to the actual meaning of them, so instead I choose to write about the boys who broke my heart instead of my friends because it's easier to read a blank page than a novel and it's easier to speak about the things that never happened than things that have, and it's easier to think about the sunlight hitting my eyelids than your empty bed