I am sun-kissed and I glow in the moonlight,
my eyes reflect like water,
and summer makes me speckle and freckle
and I crave rivers and mountains
and other things that make me beautiful.

I am long-legged like the spiders you hate,
my hair is red like roses and smells like springtime,
I am soft in a way you imagine clouds to be
and I no longer fear you or the dark.

I have grown out of sidewalk cracks,
I am a ******* garden and you can't step on me anymore.

I am too tall to be contained and too beautiful to be detained
and I will never again haunt myself with things I couldn't be.

I am too much to be too little and somewhere you always knew it.

So when you talk to me like you think I still love someone who made me believe I was just an ugly girl,
remember that there are flowers growing inside me,
and I washed the taste of your sharp tongue out of my mouth months ago.

I am an ocean with waves and depths and storms and beauty and there is so much to me that you will never get to see.

You were an anchor weighing me down confining me to one stark place of myself,

I am so much more than you ever saw, I finally know this now.

You realized before I did that we would never fit, only collide. We weren't meant for forever.
We were meant for disaster, always.
Somewhere in my bones I knew that we clashed but I couldn't explain why and now I know.
You were red, burning with passion and I was yellow, too optimistic for our own good.
Red and yellow don't match.
they only mix to form orange,
the universal sign for danger
You were a stop sign, the truck that put out the fire in my heart, the low battery light.
I was sunny, Van Gogh's paint, the midway point between go and stop. I was SLOW DOWN I was YIELD I was a sunflower that you somehow managed to crush.
Your flames grew taller than my blooms and when there was nothing left of me to burn, you moved on to a new field of flowers.
Roses this time, pink and young and innocent.
I hope she burns as poetically as I did

It's not that I choke on my words;
It's that I have no words to speak.

I could talk forever
About the silver in your hair,
The gold in your eyes;
How they prove you're a treasure.

I could babble away
About your contagious laugh,
Your sense of humor
That makes me bust a gut or shake my head.

I could whisper to a friend
About your shivering touch,
Your burning tongue;
The way you leave my body breathless.

I could preach to a crowd
About your strength,
Your courage;
How you move me to do better.

But, when it comes to how I feel,
There are no words.

'Love' is overused.
'Adoration' is an understatement.
'Infatuated' is pretentious.
'Appreciative' is too subtle.

Nevertheless, they all work:

I am in love with you, my treasure.
I adore your sense of humor.
I am infatuated with the way you touch me.
I appreciate how you move me.

'Forever' is too short a time with you,
But forever is all we have.

sheep at night, (1 a.m.)
(but i always thought that sheep were not the best farm animal to represent insomnia.). eventually sheep turns to old memories, choke down like hard candies. hurts to swallow. or maybe that's just the tears.

(2 a.m.)or bottles of beer on a wall, except i'm
numbering the ones on your floor, shattered. drinking never made you better but it never stopped you from opening another. and another.

(3 a.m.) numbers of leaves on clovers. i picked so many and i found one four-leaf one. i lost it and never found another. is it possible to lose luck as it is to gain it? if that's the case, it explains where you went.

i counted. i have.

i count but i've lost track.

there's nothing romantic about
stinging, shaking legs
and a still silence
surrounding lovers that creates
screams in their heads --
where did i go wrong
i'm such an idiot
there's nothing beautiful
about blood and self-loathing,
insecurities and guilt.
there's no turning around.
there's only moving forward.
and maybe they'll both be different,
but they'll probably stay the same.
and there's nothing --
nothing --
pretty about that.