The face that launched a thousand ships.
What must those eyes have held within them?
How full the lips, how smooth the jaw, how sculpted the cheeks,
To start wars?
A face can launch a thousand ships- indeed-
Send toy soldiers marching stiff across borders
Burn cities
Make widows and orphans,
But a soul...
A soul can push saplings up through the ashes of those very cities.
Only a soul can create,
Only a soul can nourish,
Only eyes with such exquisite tenderness behind them can spin the stars and press the moon into the palm of the night
Like a promise.
The soul informs the face,
Breathes life into it.
The loveliest features
Cannot pull the tides like a soul can.
The most vibrant gaze
Cannot capture time and halt its march the way a soul can.
Perhaps your face could launch ships
Could start fires.
But your soul...
Your soul could raise forests.

I think the sea will welcome you
For I've seen it in your eyes a hundred times,
And heard it crashing through your voice.
I think it has much to teach you in wildness
For you hold in you the same immense, awesome power
It wields when it crushes ships
And batters cliffsides smooth,
And the same silvered grace
It sways with when the moon trails her fingers through the waves on clear nights.

It does not apologize for its savagery,
For the way it rakes its fingers across the shore,
The way it takes.
It cannot be small.
It cannot be meek.
It cannot be silent.
It cannot be
Tame-
Its gentleness and its violence are lovers, ever embracing
And it has never wondered
Why.

It IS, and it is
Exquisite in its rawness.
It can be smooth as glass, murmuring its great hush to the sands
And yet it can within a moment
Rage!
With no shame, no restraint,
Uncontainable and
Unignorable.

I see all of this beneath your skin when your face darkens and you think no one has noticed.
I see your vastness, pressing out,
And I see you soothe it back into silence.
I see it and it moves me toward it like the tide
With its feral beauty,

Yes-
I imagine the ocean will rejoice to rise around you and hold you up as a part of it,
For there are some people- I've said as much-
Who belong to the earth in a special way.
People whose feet the ground worships
And whose face the wind kisses
And whose fingers the grasses reach for.

People whose eyes
The sea lives in.

I imagine it waits for you.

Welcome to the beginning again.
I am here to hold you up until you can stand to be aware.
I may be your demon while you wake, but as you rest I sustain you.
You created me to save you, and I do.
You hate me for my viciousness,
But I hate you for your weakness.
And I will be here, the framework that you are seared away to,
The skeleton, blackened, that remains when all the rest of you is ash from yet another thoughtless soul you reached for.
You reach and reach, unable to resist.
And I watch and watch, unable to prevent it,
And you tumble down, and I stand like steel.
Like iron.
I am your proxy,
Your venomous caretaker,
I am the one who tortures you lovingly back to life each time you give until you've bled out.
Welcome to the beginning again.
I am you,
If you had fangs.

Make no mistake
I have seen cities rise and fall
I have watched my temples burn
I have stood, solid,
As the earth cracked and withered at my feet-
I am NOT weak.
I have buried my grieving fingers in the dirt
And tried to resurrect a love
Gone to dust, gone to seed.
I have wailed at the moon like the loneliest wolf,
Bereft of the comfort only touch provides,
And I have torn through thorns and briars,
Desperate to follow its cold white light to the horizon
But I have never
Knelt
And I will not.
I worship from my feet,
My gods are larger than to care if I fall to a crawl in pursuit of them-
My worship bids me run
Jump
Writhe
Sing
But never surrender
For I must fight to love this sky
These hands
This earth whose pain and promise I have received
With hunger.
I must fight to stand
And it would be a disservice to anything I were to love
To let it knock me to my knees.

A choir of wolves
Dwells within my heart.
Can you hear them sing?
They're singing
To you.
Whatever your thoughts on the matter
Whatever your hesitations and limitations
Something in me is for you
And I know you know it
And I know you need it
And I hope
You listen
Because I don't care what you give me or don't, but...
This? This song?
This is yours.
Please take it.
Listen.
Listen, and grow.

Perhaps it was this feeling that originally drove humanity to create gods.
Perhaps we have always burned with a desire to love
So terrifying and so powerful that to bestow it on another living creature became...
The first sin.
Perhaps we needed a safe, indestructible being to worship,
To croon to in the night,
Whose face we could never touch but could yearn to unabashedly,
Whose hands we could never kiss but perhaps pretend they cradled us,
Whose love we could never lose because it was in fact our own reflected back.
It is a lonely love. It is a love that...
Maybe I can understand how wars were fought,
Maybe I can understand the FEAR,
The longing all wrapped up in belief, that could create such loyalty, such blindness, and such cruelty.
There is a need in us that can only be satisfied by gods,
Because on earth, in truth, it cannot be satisfied at all, and we are too maddened and too terrified by that knowledge to face it.
Better to love somebody who cannot be touched,
Who cannot be heard,
Who cannot die, or leave, or change, or fail.
(Who cannot live, or arrive, or stay, or succeed)
Somebody who cannot love back.
Whose proof we will never demand because it cannot be given, and we know it.
We choose to love something that we will never see,
Not because it fills us up
Not because it makes us complete
But because you can't lose something you don't have.

Whoever it is that you may love or wish for,
I give him my eyes.
May he look at you and see what I see,
And be unable to look elsewhere.
I give him my heart, and my gentle fingers.
I give him my words
Born of passion and of reverence
That he may sing them soft and low
And you
Hear the timbre you prefer.

I have been silent.
I have been silent not for loss
Or mourning
For those drag words from me
With or without my consent.
I have been silent because I am trying to be
Gentle
In love
When I am a thunderstorm made flesh,
A hurricane,
A seismic wave of passion and pain.
Inside
I burn
And it has been a long time
Since I have loved so deeply
As to press my sizzling hands to my own stomach
Just to keep another person from burning their fingers on the love I hold beneath my skin.
I have been silent
But I have not been extinguished-
Far from it, I have risen.
I have gone blue and white with heat.
I have wandered through the blackened trees in the ghostly calm of the night
And kindled them to flames with my palms.
I have left embers
Shifting and sighing in my footprints
And the earth has learned a new name to score into its stone and treebark when I travel through the darkness
Searching for a rest I will not find.
And there is joy in this,
There is such joy!
Although the heat presses,
Although the light licks at my ankles when I wade too far into my own heart's dreams.
I leave joy in these silent places, black and velvety and slumbering in the night-
I wake them
I wake them because I have been woken
And my heart has become something that melts
Something that burns
Something that hungers and consumes
And glows with shimmering reds and golds no matter how tightly I curl around it and hush its hissing whispers.
I leave joy because I can't contain it
And it reaches roots into the ground with every step I take-
A fearful joy,
A joy that knows its hunger
Will be its starvation.
A joy that breathes light and grasps at shadows
Because that is all it knows how to do.
A joy that turns its face up to the rain
To feel a moment's peace and cooling clarity.

Oh, I may have been silent
But I have not been quiet.

I could stand at the top of the world
Looking down across the lights spread out like twinkling spiderwebs on the ground
Little galaxies full of life,
I could stand in the dark and see them all
And it would still be your light I craved.
It would be your gravity that pulled me.
Of every light like a glittering jewel on the backs of these black velvet waves
It would be you. Just you.
I search without knowing why
Without knowing how.
I search even when I know
You are not there.
I search until I find you, however long it ever takes
And when I do I can't stop looking at your face
As if to glance away would be to lose you all over again,
When really you are just like all the others, wheeling in this sea of nighttime shadows and starlight-
When really you have no notion to be treasured or missed
Or longed for.
And yet I can't help it, I can't stop it-
I look for you.
I look to you.
Just you.

Sometimes I miss you.
The way you would try not to kiss me and fail,
Spectacularly.
Hold me like I was necessary.
Like you were starving and what you were starving for was my soul.
I loved how hard your hands were, pulling me closer,
How unafraid you were to want me once you finally admitted you did.
I really miss that, I really do.
But I think you were horrible for me.
And now that I have proof that you touched me,
I can find the strength to search for someone whose love
Won't bruise.

(You're beautiful.)

Laughing with you is better than kissing anyone else.

It's as simple as this:
Everyone I love is going to hurt me. And I choose you to be that close.
I want you
That close.

Those in the cords of my dreamcatcher are the flowers you gave me the week we met, almost two years ago. I keep them there.
I like to think they invite you in.

Sometimes looking at you is abruptly like looking directly at the sun- disconcerting, breathtaking, and dangerous all at the same time. And then something shifts and you return to yourself, and I am left blinking and unsettled.

It has been a long time
Since my hair has held the scent of cigarette smoke
From the sighed stories of a girl who has seen too much pain
And not enough tenderness.
It always comforts me
To wake in the morning
With that little reminder
That for once I showed love without
Destroying anything.

People are okay with sunsets, and rainstorms, and oceans.
People are not okay with "you are the type of person who first gave people the idea to build temples."
That is how I see you.

I will never get used to the way pettiness lives in the people I love, right along side their depth and beauty and tenderness. The people who write things that fill my heart up, whose thoughts glitter like ice in starlight, whose kindness cuts through the murk of everyday life like something divine... The same people... They are cruel. They are human. They are jealous, and insecure. They are defensive and rash. Those same exquisite, heart wrenchingly lovely people can be ugly, too- more ugly inside than others, just as they are more beautiful inside than others. Those same people can be... Tragically vicious.
I will never get used to it.

Oh.
I will never stop being ashamed to think that girls are beautiful.
That... Hurts more than I can say.

What do I need?
I need someone
To bring roses to.
Someone who will call me a dork
And say I'm sweet
And try to hide how much it means.
Someone who plays it cool
But won't set that rose down on the counter
For fear of breaking it,
As if affection is so fragile.
I need someone to tacitly agree with me
That something's there
And never talk about it-
Just enjoy it with me.
I need someone
Unafraid to break skin
And unashamed of scars
Whether they're mine or hers.
I need someone I'd name a storm after...

I need someone
To bring roses to.

I love the scars on my hands,
They mean I reached for something.

I now know two people
Who have died of selfishness
And it makes me sad.

The places I feel your name are so strange. Sometimes it makes my teeth ache. Sometimes there is a falling sensation in only my hands. Sometimes it's as if I'm being choked. Sometimes whole parts of me go numb, and fizzle with pinpricks for minutes afterwards. The concept of you always did hit me physically.

You know when you say a word so many times it loses its meaning?
My face looks like that to me today.

I'll hate you till the day I die, but I'll love you for longer.

Do you still think I'm beautiful, darling? Because I'm just itching to mar something lovely in your name tonight.

There was a girl up on stage a moment ago
Who looked like you.
Just a little.
Just enough to catch my eye.
It was when she turned slightly and the lights hit her face a certain way
And suddenly it was your face
Your hair framing it with curls
Your eyes with the smile born into them by their shape alone.
And I caught my breath.
I couldn't look away.
I loved that girl for a moment.
Loved her till my heart broke.
And then she turned her head and you were gone
And I had to collect myself
From little pieces on the floor.

There is a jar on my nightstand
Full of little scraps of paper.

When good things happen
I write them down and put them in that jar
Because I never want another year to end
Without there being proof that joy existed within it.
Anything happy, anything hopeful, anything lovely, I scribble down
And pile in that jar for safe keeping.

There is a jar on my nightstand
Full of little scraps of paper.
Today I wrote your name on one
And dropped it in.

You are the monster under my bed
That crawls up through my pillow and wraps its claws around my mind in the dark.
You are the sunbeams that reach through my windowpane and make it
Let go
You are in my head when I smile, like a consequence, like an instinct
And you are behind my eyes when I squeeze them shut in pain or fear
Like a promise.
Like a bell tolling I hear your name when it is silent and cold outside and the stars are piercing and I am fragile as ice, cracking with the sound of it rolling through my head.
I hear it slide along my skin when I run my fingers through a cat's fur and marvel at the softness and warmth and comfort.
You are in my mind.
You are wrapped around it.
I have made you a disease because you refuse to be a cure
And I will die of it
And good.
Good for you, that you will finally know what you're doing to yourself
By seeing it worn on someone else
You
Darling

You are my nightmares.
You are my daydreams.

You are the insecurities that gnaw at my stomach whenever silence falls and I squirm with thoughts I don't want to think.
You
Are the shadow that falls on the street when I wander at 2 am because I cannot be still with your name burning holes in my bones
And you are what I wake up from full of longing and disappointment when I find my dreams were false.
You are every thought, tacked on, dragged behind, holding on so that
I know of nothing now that you do not cause
That does not cause you.
You, darling, you will be the death of me.
I promised.

If you've got a date with the devil
Dress to ****.

"Oh I know her, she's pretty." Yes, isn't she? Someone else giving you a passing compliment lights my heart up and snuffs it out in the same second. I see your eyes, your smile, and I miss you excruciatingly.
Yes, isn't she?

Do you worry that I'll love you?
Sometimes I do.
But
I think that if I were to love you
I would love you the way I first learned to love:
Quietly, and with no demands.
I think if the worst were to happen
I wouldn't reach for you
Only tell you
That you are beautiful.
Perhaps
It has happened already.
I wonder if I fear it, sometimes.
But what I really fear
Is that you will fear it.
I wonder if you worry that I'll love you
And you are just too good
Too truly good
To do anything about it.
If you do worry,
You needn't:
If I were to love you
I would love you like you were made of glass-
Delicate, exquisite, and untouchable.

There is something beautiful about two sad people who agree to hurt each other.
Something comforting.
It is a comfort only very damaged people understand- the tacit agreement to cause pain, and to receive it.
Pleasure is for people who have what they want.
But for those of us who are starving, ours is best peppered with suffering.
Being with someone who understands that carries its own worth-
I don't want you to make me feel good.
I couldn't stand it if you did.
I don't want you to touch me gently, or ask if I'm alright, or stop to look into my eyes.
I am starving, and so are you: I want your teeth.
I want you to make me hurt. And I want to hurt you.
I want you to hurt me because I'm not him, and I want to hurt you because you're not her.
We want to see each other suffer because we are starving and we need to feel that someone else is.
Don't hold back. I want you to lower me because I'm too good for her.
Don't love me, don't caress me. Dig your nails in. Drip candlewax on my stomach.
One step down from torture is all I can stand in the way of human connection, when it isn't her.
Punish me for looking at her like a baleful puppy tonight, even as you waited in my room with your soft skin and your sharp teeth.
There is nothing you can do that will be too violent, too brutal, too sadistic.
I don't want to be loved right now.
I am too raw.
I want to be touched. I want to be ruined. Leave marks. Smear lipstick.
Lower me because I am
Too
****
Good for her.
Let this heart know on no uncertain terms that its needs don't matter.
Help me **** it. Help me pin my demons to the bed and make them writhe, and I will do the same for you.
Let's exorcise our loves tonight and banish them to hell.
Let's tell our skin that it is irrelevant.
Let's say "*******" to the things that bind us. I will cut your heart out for him.
I will kiss your scars, not to heal them but to remind you that when you put them there you fought for something, something we both fight for now.
Hurt me. Fight her. Do it for her.
Do it for her because I'm not good enough to hurt.
Do it for her because I'm TOO good to hurt.
Crush me.
You could boil me alive and it wouldn't make up for her, so at least leave me bruised.  
I will give you what you need, and you will give me what I need: not love, but contact.
Please,
Let my heart know on no uncertain terms that its needs
Don't
Matter.

There is something beautiful about two sad people who agree to hurt each other.

I want to make art for you.
I want to make art for you because you are beautiful.
Because you're simple, not in a coarse way, but in a wholesome way.
In a way like the sky or the rain.
You just are, and I wish I just was.
I want to make art for you to thank you for that.
I want to make art for you because I think maybe not enough people have.
Because you ever wanted to die,
And because I'm so glad you didn't.
Because you like storms the way I do
And you make me think new thoughts when I don't think I'll ever find any more
And because you hold a thousand people inside of you, ready to leap onto a page or seep out through your skin,
All of them beautiful and clear
(Like the sky and the rain)
I want to make art for you because
There should be art out there because of you.
Not just created by you
But created because of you.
I want to make art for you because you are another way to love someone
That I didn't know existed.

Silence often stills me.
I don't like it.
Sometimes I will accidentally find myself sitting in silence
And a cascade of sadness will begin to drift over me
And inside I will see it coming
And in my mind I will flee from it.
But...
It's like sleep paralysis, almost.
If you've ever woken up unable to move when you want to, you know the feeling I mean.
Get up! I think.
Turn on the television.
Take your pills.
Eat something.
Get a voice besides your own into your head
Now
Or it will be dire.
And I sit there
Still.
Paralyzed.
Feeling black ice glaze over where my panic should be
And depression creeping towards me like a dense fog.
And just as I am about to be swallowed by it
My mind returns to my body
And I jump up, escaping.
It is
Disconcerting to say the least.

Unless you're very lucky, one day you will look into the eyes of someone you love and know with all your heart, and find absolutely nothing familiar there. And you will never find any of it again. As if they've just gone. And there must be reasons, but you will never know them. You will only endure their consequences.

My skin often feels like
An ill fitting suit.
Too big in spots
Too tight in others
With seams showing and scratchy fabric.
My life often feels that way-
Something I tug at that settles for a moment
And then shifts back into discomfort when I take a breath.
Sometimes its worn spots let in the cold wind,
Vicious.
Sometimes it sticks to me and refuses to peel away, suffocating.
I feel like a child in church
In her Sunday best
Who knows she must sit still and quiet
Even as the shoes pinch
And the stiff collar closes round her neck.
I sneak glances around me
Trying to discern if anybody else feels
This way.
They all seem content.
Comfortable.
Still.
Perhaps if I just breathe shallowly
And don't move a muscle
I will learn what they know
And settle into my shrink-wrapped existence.
"Tiny people with tiny lives-"
Is it the truth?
Or do they just look small
Because they've learned to squeeze into the space they've been given?
Does the woman ordering coffee in her business suit and heels
Sit up nights, unable to sleep for a longing she can't name?
Does the man mopping the floors
Dream of a woman he will never touch
Again?
I wish I could find those parts of people.
The parts they hide.
Because mine won't stay hidden.
There is something too thin between me
And the world
And it is poorly fashioned
And it is tattered.
And sometimes people look at me with disdain
As if I've walked out of my house naked
Unable to properly clothe myself
And I wonder
If they aren't
Right.

You need to go.
And I don't know how to do it.
I don't want to forget you, to cut you off. I don't want to shatter my love for you.
There has to be another way.
But... you need to go.
I can't keep waking up sore every morning. Raw.
I can't keep talking myself out of tears.
I can't keep wondering why the hell you matter to me, and abusing myself for caring about you.
But I don't know how to do it. It's not in me to extinguish a love.
I have sacrificed every part of myself at least once to avoid it.
It has been the single thing I am unwilling to do.
The one unwavering line in the sand.
And I know where this leads- this trying to erase it.
I know because I've tried,
In pain,
In desperation, to destroy a love before. And I couldn't do it.
I threw more and more at it, unleashed every weapon I had.
And by the end...
I had caught the rest of me in the crossfire, and the only thing that remained untouched was that love.
You need to go.
But that will happen again if I try to uproot you from my soul.
It is a humbling lot. A prideless realization. That I must wait.
That I must serve the part of me that holds me captive, the only part of me I know as indestructible,
The part that reigns because nothing can dethrone it.
I must bow to it, because I like what else I am.
I know that even if I tried with every ounce of courage and hatred I have built up over my years to demolish my love for you, the dust would clear,
And it would be the only thing about me left.
And I don't want it to be.
I don't respect it enough to let it be my defining factor.
And so I sit and stew and wait, for it to loosen its stranglehold, or for you to come back.
It is a prideless thing. And I am a proud person.
And it chafes every single day.
And I swallow it, and go on.

Today I saw a photo of you
Holding a little puppy and smiling
And your hands were in its fur and I looked a second too long at them
And I found myself thinking how much I love your palms
And the creases in them
And how soft your fingertips are
And how you are one of the only people
With hands smaller than mine
Small and perfect and smooth, like a child's.
And the force of how much I love you
Crept up behind those thoughts
And crashed through in a wave
And I looked away, chagrined,
Embarrassed to have such beautiful thoughts
About somebody who won't even speak to me.

I'm angry with you for staying away because we only have a short time to know each other. You'll have a life, I'll have a life, this is IT. This is the time we have. And you're wasting it, even though I know you care about me. You're ******* it up, the only time we have to change each other, to help each other, to love each other. I gave you the least amount of pressure humanly possible for someone who loves another person. I asked only that you not stay away, and you couldn't even do that. I am angry with you because you are squandering your chance to be loved by me, and my chance to love you. There are no strings, no demands, nothing. The ONLY thing I begged you for was time to be near you, in whatever way you chose. And you ran. Because you think there's forever, you think you can just flit back and forth and there's time to be cowardly, but there just isn't. I adore you, but every day you stay away, I realize more how utterly foolish you are, and what we're both losing because of it.

I love all of you.
I can't help it.
Every inch.
The cruel parts
The kind parts
The selfishness and the tenderness.
The courage and the cowardice-
I'm the real deal.
I
Love
You.
As you are.
As you were.
As you will be.
And I know how uncommon my love is.
And I want you to have it
So take it.
Please take it.
It just won't have anybody else.