There is a type of perfect summer rainstorm that exorcises the heat from the ground in billows of mist and makes the world hazy.
The lightning sets the trees into relief and every so often a little light leaf will float to the ground.
The thunder rumbles, the sky crackles, and the clouds are leaden and low in the sky, brushing the treetops.
The rain makes it look like they are falling on you when you look up.
It catches in your eyelashes and strokes the side of your face with little rivulets of water, it plays in your hair and swirls around your ankles, a warm melody.
I met a girl once with eyes like a rainstorm.
Their steady gaze has never left me, for it felt like standing in one to meet it.

When it comes,
And it always comes,
Do you steel yourself,
Tense up like a coiled spring?
Do you fall to your knees and let it break over your head?
Or do you take a deep, calming breath,
And invite it cordially,
Like a familiar friend you may sit down to tea with?
The answer defines you.

When it comes,
And it always comes scalding,
I level my gaze-

*Hello, old friend. Do you take sugar with your heartache?

There was a frozen winter day
Once long, oh years ago,
And all the trees were black with ice;

The hills all bathed in snow.

And I was wand'ring quite alone,
All through the silent fall,
Musing on your lovely face;

And hurting from it all.

And suddenly upon my path
I spied a footprint light
Where none had been before, I saw;

A little shoe's delight.

And round I looked in sudden pause
For I had shed a tear
And hoped that not a soul had seen;

Nor had they been so near.

And out from in the forest shown
A little shadow's form
A girl, a child, all pale and slight;

Who wandered far from home.

Her hair was black as raven wings
Her cheek pale as the snow,
Her lips were red like holly fruit;

Her eyes as dark as coal.

Her dress was sable as spilled ink
And frost adorned in lace
The little sleeves, and on her throat;

A velvet choker placed.

And she crept down from out her trees,
And took me by the hand
She whispered she could ease my pain;

And lead me to her land.

Her fingers felt like ice and I
Shivered so at their touch,
But truth be told I well knew cold;

From missing you so much.

And so I took her at her word,
Followed her through the trees,
And when I knew not where we were;

I sank down to my knees.

I told her all the things I kept
Locked up inside my heart,
I looked to her as seraphim;

To ease my pain and hurt.

For her steps no lasting footprint left,
Her weight no twig could break,
The snow absorbed into her skin;

Her voice no breeze would make.

I asked her what the meaning was,
For I was sure she knew,
I begged her for an answer then;

To why I covet you.

She told me she was shade and sun,
That she would tell me all,
"But pull the velvet round my throat;

And you will surely know."

My fingers stiff and blue with cold
I tugged the velvet cord,
And my savior's head fell in the snow;

Without another word.

And suddenly the world was white
And not a trace was left,
I held a velvet ribbon and;

My answer close as death.

And I laid down among the snow,
I closed my weary eyes,
For I had found and lost my chance;

To strip off your disguise.

And you will live inside my heart-
Even in numbing cold-
A hum of lightning melting me;

Until I'm weak and old.

For I will love you all the year,
Through storms and sunny days,
And I will have no answers for
The whys or hows or ways.

You are loud
And you are drunk
And I turn up my music
Try to mask the shrillness of your laughter
The bus is dark
And it is late
And I sit in my usual bubble of stillness
As if I am alone.
I hate that I can hear you.
Takes me out of my head
And into your world
Where I've got no power.
I sit and gaze out the tinted window at the streetlights
And a car passes- whoosh
Sudden like a knife
Its sharp slice of color through the blackness
Stirs my blood
And I check my thoughts
You are still
So ******* loud
And so ******* empty
Here
Take some of this
And burn with it.
See if you laugh then.
But I say nothing to you.
That is your place
And this
Is mine.
My heel connects with the grungy floor
And strikes a spark
Bang
Like a gun.
Bang
And flames lick the soft rubber of my boot
It smells like a car wreck.
I look away
Disinterested
And wherever I flick my gaze
Embers flare.
Fire races down the walkway towards the back window
Orange and
Breathlessly fast.
Long shadows dance on the walls
Glint off the windows
And throw your faces into sharp relief
Now you look
Like laughing corpses
Skeletal and distorted in firelight.
I like you better this way.
My coat catches
And I feel the heat as
The flames from the floor
Lap at my fingers
Like whining dogs
And I feel them blister
But they remain smooth and white.
I flex them, testing their new hardness
They are bone white
Bone hard
And they clink together
And the flames
Do not matter.
You are still loud
And drunk
And laughing
And you have no idea
Who you're sitting across from.

When you hurt me and I'm okay about it, it doesn't mean that you've taught me to be stronger, or improved my outlook, or...done anything positive, actually. If you hurt me and I don't fall apart, it only means that you were the last connection I had to my feelings, and that by cutting it off you have cut the last of my ties and sent me drifting away from everybody in my life. When I actually love you and you actually hurt me, any "okay" you see, and tell yourself you've made me strong and wise enough to achieve, is actually just a slow paralysis of the heart, a spreading numbness that, honestly, scares me more than any pain.
Heads up. The silent treatment is actually never helpful.

You can spend all that time
Looking at yourself in the mirror
But you'll never see what I see when I look at you.
I watched you find your flaws every day.
I wanted you to see your perfections.
That page,
That is what you are.
That is what I see.
I wanted to show you what the world sees when it looks at you.
You're art.
I want you to remember that, as you go forward.
You are art. You make people feel something.
Your beauty and your flaws,
Both are exquisite.
I drew you the way I did,
I doggedly kept on
Until I captured whatever essence makes you mesmerizing,
Because I wanted you to know what it's like for us,
The others,
To look at you.
You are art.
Don't forget it.

It's only when I first wake
That the world has teeth.
Fangs.
Throughout the day their venom dulls the pain but ah-
That tiny hiccup of time
When my eyes first open and I feel
Consumed...
It takes all day long to fully recover.
It's only in the very morning-
On the cusp of waking-
That your silence, your distance
Sinks its teeth into the tender skin of my neck.
"It's been days,"
Words rush through my veins
Poisoned by the possibility of truth.
"She regrets you."
And that moment....
It ruins me.
And inside I curl up and wither,
Dusty and dry and brown,
An ugly, wretched thing-
And then I throw the covers off
And slap my vulnerable feet
On the frozen floor.

You see? There, it's raining
And little diamond droplets of
Hello love
Catch in my eyelashes.
What a world we live in.
It is so painted by our fingers.

March rain must be greeted,
Windows unlocked and flung open
Fingers questing in the dark
For a few drops of
It-gets-better,
Cold and clear like every river,
Soft and uninvasive like grateful tears-
Finally.
Rain must be welcomed
Tenderly;
It is a fragile thing
As much as it is a wild thing
And it needs the tremulous touch of your fingers
As much as you need the reassurance of its rhythm-
It-gets-better, it-gets-better,
It gets
Better.
And that is why I fling wide the curtains
And fumble with the latch on my own personal pane of blackness
And reach, gentle and breathless, through the little gap
Where the wind sighs cold
And feel the words change my fingerprints-
It-gets-better, it-gets-better,
It gets
Better.

Lead me by the hand and sit me down like I'm a child.
Dry my tears, and take me in your arms.
I've not had love for a tragically long while,
And I'm simply too tired to continue going on.
I'm too young to feel so weary,
I'm too old to be so scared,
And nobody ever hears me
When I beg to be repaired.
I'm too passionate to stop,
And I'm too damaged to go on,
Too self destructive to be taught
That my safe security is gone.

There is a place for you in this world.
There is.
You won't be alone forever.
Someday, you will love someone who will love you back, and it will set your entire soul alight.
You will be beautiful, and free, and alive like you've never been.
You'll be everything you never thought you'd want to be,
And your life will inspire you in ways you never expected,
To do things you never thought you'd be able to do.
Just you wait and see.
It's not over.
This day,
This person you adore who can't love you,
This place where no one really understands you-
They will all pass, and you'll move beyond them
To see a world that can fill you up and teach you how vast you can be, if only you never close yourself to it even when it hurts you.
This pain will pass. This helplessness will pass.
It will all burn away in the fire of your passion and you will
Never
Be powerless again.
You'll see breathtaking cities and rolling hills and endless seas
And you'll meet beautiful people and you will learn things you never knew to wish you knew.
Just wait.
And don't give up.
There are people out there like you, don't you forget it.
You are never alone.
Never.

I gaze into the abyss not in fear or even fascination,
But in the hope that the longer I gaze, it may give me something of itself and live in me.

This girl,
With her magnetic eyes and her soft touch of a voice,
She's gonna be the death of me.
I murmured it into her hair the first time she kissed me,
"You're going to **** me."
I said it like a prayer.
Sometimes she says things
And the certainty bursts upon me all over again
That I'll be dead and buried, by this
Girl.
Her mind is like... like the way the lights reflect on the water at night,
So dazzling and fiery, so hard to capture or comprehend.
Sometimes she'll say something in a flash of light
And I will feel it hit the core of me
With a sound like thunder
And my heart will actually stutter in helplessness
And I'll think,
*This is it, this is the moment...
She's going to be the death of me
And I will die
Smiling

The days grow cold and so do I
And leaden clouds fill up the sky
And the hopes within me start to die
Dwelling sadly on your lightning eyes
You do not look at me.

Were your lips really on mine?
You asked for me to cross the line,
But is my passion really "fine"?
Perhaps your silence is a sign.
Did you ever look at me?

And as bleak winter stumbles in
I wonder if I live in sin
For waiting for "self" to begin
Until I can your focus win,
And feel your gaze on me.

Frozen, paused and deathly still,
I hold my breath enough to ****
Still here by silent force of will,
Nothing matters, all meaning distilled
Til you would look at me.

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.

You have a kind face.
People with kind faces always draw me in, like a candleflame draws a moth.
I have seen enough of beauty to know
That people with kind faces can immolate you
With the terrible force of their loveliness.
But... they are so very warm.

You do have
Such a kind face.

I said 3 weeks would be short
If we were dying at the end of them.
And you laughed
[rendering a nearby streetlight useless, inadequate and dull]
And said, "We're not dying."
I wanted to reply
Oh but
We are
We are all dying.
The point is how terribly... temporary
All this is.
3 weeks or 3 years or 3 decades or a whole century,
It's not enough!
It's never enough.
And we don't know.
(We never know)
Hell,
We could have
3 days
3 hours
3 minutes
Left here.
Why
Do you think I kissed you
Even when I was scared to?
Because, there's just not
Time
For scared.
And if I were to die
So soon
I'd be much more afraid
Of what I didn't do
Than of what I did.
I thought all of that, but...
You were smiling at me,
Playing the disagreement like a game,
And I love it when you push
And I love it when you win,
And I love it when you smile,
And
If I only did have 3 minutes just then
I'd have wanted to be laughing with you
Because I love that you really do think
We have time.

I could change your life, you know.
I could kiss you and unravel the second skin you've slipped on to hide your pain, your loneliness-
Beautiful as a canvas, painted so that none of the seams can be seen,
I could free you of it for a moment.
I could drop it to the floor like silk, and you would breathe like the domed sky out west-
Blue and unbroken and vast enough to swallow the earth.
I could look at you and you wouldn't flinch, wouldn't crumble;
I would touch you with tenderness.
What do you hold inside?
I wonder if you are a storm, or a forest fire. A river perhaps.
I never turn my head unless I feel gravity: You are vast inside, and it tugs at me.
Tell me who you are. Your secrets, your dreams.
I could change your life, you know.

I can look at photos you've taken, and your appreciation for beauty brings tears to my eyes. I'm not even sure what kind of love that is, but I know that it surges through me in a way that feels... fragile. Last night after you left me I walked in the dark for a long time, and I could hardly breathe. Not for fear or for pain or for uncertainty, but... because my body has always acutely known, whenever I see you, how utterly inadequate it is to contain and channel the joy I am capable of feeling. I walked because I could not be still. Something was coursing through me, a wild, unfathomable elation, an awe to be alive. In equal and opposite intensity to the depths of pain I've felt, it rushed beneath my skin, pressing out from my fingertips so that I had to clench and unclench my hands just to rein it in. I took deep breaths just to hold myself together, because somehow that euphoria was working its way in between the molecules of me, pushing them apart, trying to expand me into something vast enough for it to inhabit, and unmaking me in the process. I have told you that you may **** me, and what I always meant was that- that you bring forward such incredible, unprecedented love and wonder in me, such joy that something in me realizes what I usually ignore: That I was simply not made durable or enormous enough to survive my own capacity to feel. It is that sweet, aching mortality that I experience every time I love. I am addicted to it. I am in awe of it. That lovely expansion of my heart against my ribs, against my lungs, which makes me gasp for air and cling to the life I need to continue living to experience more of this indescribable elation. When I look at you I know that I am so, so very unprepared to love the way I do, so small, so breakable, and so....eager, to throw myself in, to pour out this passion that demands so insistently to be expressed that its restlessness inside of me presses me forward out into the night, to wander until the sun begins to rise. When I said I would love you with the same level of desire that every living being has ever had for its continued existence, this is what I meant. I MEANT it. I mean it. I've given up being scared of it. This...is a gift. I can feel this. And I will. I will feel it until it either crushes me, or changes me. And I will feel it for you.

I am art.
I have made myself
Art.
Not just a creator of it
But the thing itself,
With all its mercurial strengths and flaws.
If I make my art
About you
I have made myself
About you.
It is the biggest, most secret gift
I ever give:
To love someone
Is to make them immortal.
It is to sing the song of their soul
To the best of my ability
Until the day I die.

Dear Sky,
Help me open my heart.
I know what to wish for
All this time later.
She was in my arms last night,
And I had no wishes then,
Not a one,
And if there was a sky,
I could not have cared less.
Tonight I know what to wish for.
You are cold and clear
And the haze is gone
And I want
To fall into this love
Without fear lurking below me like a safety net of needles.
Please, help me give up that instinct
To turn to stone at the first sign of trouble.
Help me relinquish my misgivings and my doubts
That I clutch like weapons against the calm and joy I feel
In her arms,
Because we both know that if the end is coming
It will come whether or not I see it miles off.
Please,
Blind me with the light of her smile.
Let me see this moment,
Let me see what I have
And not what I could lose.
Help me unzip my skin and lay in the moonlight
Bare and honest
Exposed down to the weakest little corner of my soul.
Help me find the courage to believe the best of this world
With its barbed wire edges,
Even with.
If I give my heart to these cold stars
And set aside the fear and doubt
If I show you courage
Will you show me comfort?

When I was a small child
I had no brothers and sisters
And was often alone.
And sometimes,
Although as I grew older and began to loathe silence
This happened less and less frequently
I would have a thought
And it would ring in my head clear as day
And I would stop and wonder to myself
REALLY wonder
If I'd said it out loud.
I would convince myself that of course I had.
But that odd moment of doubt
Would linger in the pit of my stomach
And then I would decide that the only way to dispel the unsettling feeling
Was to say something-anything-aloud and prove,
Once and for all, that I could.
And then, of course,
I'd be sure I'd said it
And able to move on with my life unbothered.
So I would speak
Deliberately.
I would draw breath, and say whatever sentence popped into my head
And then I would wait a moment,
To be sure it really took.
But
See
Since I was all alone
Within that moment,
I became unsure all over again-
Had I REALLY said anything at all?
I'd meant to say something,
I'd tried to say something...
But had I?
There was nobody to ask.
There was no way to check.
It created a distinct sense of... otherness.
Of strangeness
That wouldn't leave
And within moments I would be so mixed up
That my skin would crawl with this paranoia
That maybe
Just maybe
I didn't exist
And I hadn't said anything
Because something that doesn't exist can't have a voice
To say something WITH.
This would continue
Until, hopelessly upset, I would run downstairs to find my mother
And cry to her
For what she thought
Was no apparent reason.
That, friends,
Is a big part of why I
Loathe
Being ignored.
And also probably the underlying reason
That as a grown adult, I never sit in silence.

Just like these silly little gifts, my love can gather dust in a drawer,
Or it can be yours
But it cannot be made use of any other way.
It cannot be given to another.
THIS love, this here,
It is for you.
It is not transferable.
If I am forced I will love again, some other way, some other person,
But YOUR LOVE
Will never leave me.
This gorgeous, precious feeling...
It will sit abandoned on some dust covered shelf,
A beautiful thing never touched because of its worth.
That is why your guilt puzzles me.
You are not taking anything from me,
Not putting my adoration to unworthy use-
It is for no one else but you.
It could not even reach another.
It is ONLY yours,
And so,
Like your gifts, like your flowers, like everything I try to give you
You may take it and let it rejoice at its entire purpose of existence,
Or you may let it gather dust
And become heavy with grief.

Every time I think I know how much I love you
I'm wrong.
It is bottomless
Boundless.
It shocks me.
I've been loving all my life,
Loving to distraction,
Loving till I sobbed from the beauty of it.
I thought I knew what it was.
But I've never loved anyone or anything
This much.
It is too vast even to scare me.
The universe could expand tenfold
And it wouldn't be so enormous
Or so complete.
And something this important-
It could crush me, couldn't it?
It could erase me?
And yet I trust it the way I trust my own heartbeat
Because it has become that constant
A part of how I live,
Woven into my bones,
Coursing through my veins,
Filling my lungs as I sleep
Dreaming of a life with you.
I stare at the words every time you send them
"I love you."
And I know that even if I see and hear and feel them from you every day, every
Moment
For the rest of my life
I will never lose my aching thirst for them,
Or my awe that you mean them.
Those words.
I will never have enough of them.
I will never have enough of you,
Never close enough, never together for long enough, not if we live a thousand years.
I will never stop craving your voice, your hands, your thoughts and little mannerisms,
Your warmth beside me in bed.
You are the beginning and the end.
At night
You follow me into my dreams
And in the morning
You rise in my heart before the sun,
In my mind before I even know I'm awake.
If you will have me,
I'd rather be with you than ever go to heaven,
And if you'd let me
I would follow you into hell.
Please,
Have me
Always.
Have all of me.
Every time I think I know how much I love you,
I'm wrong.
It can't be known.
It can only be felt.

The people who chase the happy things? Who listen to bouncy music and laugh freely and celebrate every moment of life? Here's the secret:
They're the ones who have been demolished by life.
They know.
They get what's important.
They steal every moment of joy they can get their hands on, miser them all away for the terrible times,
Because they know that it's only a matter of time
Until the tide comes in.

The truth is every time you start to fade from the front of my mind
You say something sweet,
Something unexpected
That just knocks me out.
You can reach into my heart and move things around.
Nobody else can do that.
You're in here with me, right up against every part that never sees the sun.
There aren't words for this, this joy that crawls up my throat and makes tears well along with my smiles.
I can't hold it, I can't handle it,
How much I love you.
Never could.
I used to shake when you would touch me-
When ever.
I've loved since, but never like an earthquake, never like a mountain crumbling into the sea.
Nothing moves me like you do.
I swear, you could unmake me by the atom
Pull every little part of me apart
And I'd love it.
You could stand in front of me and say you loved me
And with your words you could separate every molecule of me
Until I burst like a dying star.
I talk in constellations, of you.
You are too immense to speak of with anything but the stars.
I could laugh or cry, or both, from how much I only want you
To be here and hold me,
To demolish our walls and turn me inside out.
You could smash me like glass
And I could be a thousand beautiful diamonds of razor sharp.
Maybe if you grind me to dust with your gravity
I will be small enough to fit the closest to you
That anything has been.
Maybe I could become a shade, and step forward,
And be in exactly the same place as you.
Maybe our hearts could overlap and sync up,
And maybe then I wouldn't long, with a terror and an ecstasy that melts me inside,
To be closer
Closer
Closer
To you,
No matter how entwined we are.

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.

I only want you to know who I am.
I don't know why.
It shouldn't matter.
But it's hardwired in, a biological need
To explain myself.
You won't read my poetry
Because you don't want to see my pain.
You won't see the movies or read the books
That change my life.
You don't pay attention
To what my art is saying.
And yet you want me close.
Read one.
Just read
ONE.
You want me close.
I am giving you
CLOSE.
You are the one
Backing away.

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.

I will keep shocking you until you realize that I will always shock you.

I will do precisely what you wish I wouldn't do,
Until you understand that my life depends on you.

I will keep dying until you realize that I will always die, and that there is nothing you can do about it.

I will throw away the things you love in me,
Until my love is all there is and all you see.

I will keep hurting until you realize that you care if I do.

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

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.

I think
You took all my patience.
I think
You used it all up
Thinking it
Would
Always be there.

Because now
There is
Not
One
Ounce
Left for you.

*...Oops.

Dear you,
There is something nobody ever told me
That I think
A lot of people need to hear.
It's okay to need things.
Your soul is not toxic.
Your craving for love
Is not freakish
Or wrong
Or shameful.
Your loneliness
Does not make you pathetic.
Seeking help
Or advice
Or comfort
Does not make you weak.
Loving someone who doesn't love you
Doesn't make you a fool.
Your best
Is good enough.
You don't have to try
To need less.
This world
Is not
A church
And you
Are not Christ-
You don't need to sacrifice
For the rest of them.
And if
You are starving for connection
Nobody should ever make you ashamed of that.
People
Will leave you
People
Will be angry at you
For the staggering depth of your need.
But people
Are not always right
When they tell you
You are wrong.
You are not wrong.
You are not a freak.
You are not an abomination.
You are not needy.
You are not foolish.
You are not weak.
You are not pathetic.
You are not
Crazy.
You are just
Human
And humans need
And you don't have to ask permission
To admit you have feelings.
I wish someone had told me that
A long time ago.

I promised myself I wouldn't talk to you
For a week.
Every day of that week,
I woke up feeling sick.
Feeling like there was a pressure cooker
In my chest
And the only way to let off steam
Would be to say something to you.
I battled.
I won.
I trudged through every ****** moment,
And yes,
It was hard the entire time,
And yes,
I hated myself for being unable to stop
Wishing I could just fold.
And the only thing that kept me going
Was that if I waited long enough
Maybe you'd notice you wondered where I went.
If I could just wait a week, that was how long it had been
Since you said anything to me.
If I could wait a week
We would be on equal footing
For once.
If I could just
For once
Not be the one trying so ******* hard
To get your attention...
And here it is,
A week.
A week I bribed myself through
With the promise that the moment it had passed
I could say one little hello to you,
And the possibility that maybe you'd say something
Back.
Here it is,
A week
And
What I realized this morning
When I opened my eyes and thought of you
Like always
Is that now that I've gone this far
I am afraid to lose my self respect...
Just for now, I have a glimmer of pride in my own heart.
Just for now, I find that I am much more afraid to say something to you
And have you ignore me again
And feel powerless and stupid and...
WEAK again,
And have to live in fear, loathing myself for loving you so much,
Than I am to trudge on in painful
But calm
Silence.

Heart,

This
Is just a day.
And if you are stronger than it
If you remember that it will go by
You have a chance to keep your pride until tomorrow.
Say
Nothing.
Say nothing or tonight I will be at you,
"I told you so, I told you so,"
Until you wonder how you ever gave in
Knowing it would be so brutal.
Do not give in.
Do not.
You are better than that,
And if you act otherwise
You will feel so much worse
Than just forgotten.
Remember
She is not what you have to fear.
I am.

Mind.