Maybe if your promises are only air like breathing,
Maybe so is your instant painful stabbing sudden leaving.
Maybe if you lied to me a thousand and one times,
You're lying once again, my love, and you'll be back sometime.
If you really love me, if you really meant your words,
Then maybe that love, even shot down, will linger in your world.
When I said that I could wait, I'm not sure you truly guessed.
I can wait for you until you cool, til you recall the rest:
The love, the irreplaceable, the devotion and the smiles
That honeyed both our worlds for the barest little while.

Maybe if you must leave me now you'll remember me in time,
Remember why you tried for me like no one else in line.
Don't think I won't be broken, but don't think that I will die.
I've got a life to live, a song to sing, a love to worship by.
You're here with me before, you're here with me hereafter.
You're here inside my soul, and you're what makes my heart hum faster.

Maybe if you leave me, I will lie in misery,
But darling if you leave me, you will not be killing me.
I've still got you to live for, doesn't matter if you hate me so,
I'll be living like I love you until death has laid me low.
And even then, my foolish love, I'll smile in my grave
Having known a life of loving you, of having my heart gave.

Maybe if I die in cold grey longing for your touch,
I'll see you then beyond the light, and never want for such.
I can't say I won't be wretched, I can't say I won't be crushed,
But I can say, my love, that I will live, if living cased in rust.
My friend, my love, perfect and pained, don't fret over my demise.
It will take much more than another fall to force me not to rise.
If you miss my company, if you truly love me dear,
I'll be where I have always been, for you, unfailingly
Here.

Could it be?
Could it be that there is a chance for me in this world
To live the way I want?
Could someone I love
This much
Love me
As much
For the rest of our lives?
I always dismissed the idea
As a dream,
A fairytale,
Maybe something someone better, stronger,
Than me
Might have a chance at but never did I
Really think
Wow, I could have
What I want most dearly in the world.
I could spend my life with someone I love
Who loves me
And laugh and cry and raise our kids
And look at her every morning and night
When I wake and before I fall asleep.
Oh god please let it be that way,
Please give me all my days to memorize her.
I want to be able to close my eyes and know every detail of her
Every line in her face, every small, fleeting expression, every melody in her voice, every color in her hair,
Every dream in her eyes
Oh, may all of them come true
I
Can't
Pray enough,
I don't know how to ask for
Everything I've ever wanted
To stay.
I don't know how to say thank you
For even finding it at all.
For finding her.
But this feeling....
Oh, it fills my bones with light.
It is such an exquisite, excruciating longing.
Such a relief, so pure it holds every other emotion inside it.
I swear, this is what makes me human, I swear I am everyone in the world when I think of her- I have to be, to hold how much of me there is, how many feelings bloom in the core of me.
So many, so many that have no names. There are no words
To pray with
Maybe that
Is what I mean.
There is no possible way to say what loving this girl feels like
I can't make sense of it
I can't hold it
I can't even express it
I can only feel it
And marvel at it
And hold it like a candle against this dark, dark world
Because it is what I have
Always longed for.
This love.
This is what I cried for as a child,
This is what I was born missing
And I've found it.
And I don't know whose feet to fall at for that
I don't know if anything exists to receive such gratitude
But some days I can just feel it rising in me,
How can I ever love you enough?
How can I even explain...?
Certainly not
In this choppy, disjointed poem
Spilling my words all over the page as if maybe if I pile up enough of them they will merge to mean
Something anywhere near as vast
As what I feel for you;
How
Do I tell you that I know why I'm here
I finally know why I'm here

And it's you?

The problem is
You feel like home.
Your voice feels like home.
Your eyes feel like home.
And your arms
Feel like home.
Somebody once told me
Not to make my home a person.
And I think making my home you
Is rather like moving into someone's house
While they're off to Florida for the holidays
But...
It is cold out here,
And you are
So ******* beautiful.
And who needs metaphors, anyway?

I want you to know
That when you cry it rains somewhere.
The sky opens
And a drought is ended.
Something that had been parched
Grows again.
The ocean lives in you
Vast and brutal and
Exquisite
And I hope you are never ashamed of the storms that come,
Of your power or of your
Surrender-
Grief is just as sacred as joy
And one cannot exist without the other.
Nothing grows without both
And you are
Wrong
When you say you must be half dead.
You are
Vividly
Wonderfully
Sharply alive-
You cut the world with your pain
And it bleeds beauty:

Where your tears fall
Things
Grow.

What will I do
If I stop missing you?
That may be my most persistent, strangling fear:
Not the searing, direct pain of being parted from you
But the dull erosion
Of forgetting you by degrees.
What if
Someday
I am sitting in a coffee shop in the wintertime
On hiatus from my hectic life
And in the bare and honest moments of mental solitude
That come between the wisps of steam from my cup
You're not there
In my head?
What if someday, for a moment,
I live without you
And discover that I can?
That moment will be my greatest loss,
My dive from heaven,
My hardest fall.
And
I
won't
even
realize.

Time waiting is time wasted
But if you can't make up your mind
Take my time, take my time.
To someone who knows precisely what she wants
Every second of every day
Time spent waiting is time thrown away
But take my time
Because what else
Could really be done with it?

As a black hole of emotion,
You must learn and know
What not to ask
And when not to ask it.
The most important thing you can learn
As a tender human being with raw nerves like the elements of an electric stove-
White hot-
Is not to take more than you are offered
Even when it is far
Far less
Than what you need.

Two missed calls.
There is a little message that blinks
On the screen of my phone.
Two missed calls.
It threw a milky glow upon the room
All night last night,
Flaring and fading.
I'd only have to touch it to make it stop.
Two missed calls
From the night my life changed
Again.
From the time I held my phone and
Stared
Down at your name as it rang
And rang
And rang
Transfixed.
Petrified.
I wonder what they saw-
My friends, who watched the color drain
From my cheeks,
Watched my gaze latch onto that little screen
As if it were the barrel of a gun.
They stopped talking.
They stopped asking if I was okay, too,
After a moment,
And there we all were
Frozen
Them in uncertainty
Me in shock and fear
And the only sound in the entire world was that phone
Buzzing.
It rang in my hands
And then stopped.
And then instantly began again,
Your picture glowing on its black surface.
And I stared at it.
I felt dizzy.
I felt...cold.
As if I was floating just a little bit
Above and behind my own body
And the air could get through me
To all the little places that air
Is never supposed to touch
And I was so
Cold.
Two missed calls
Before I finally scrambled away,
Locked myself in the bathroom and answered.
My voice
Bounced off the tiles
And made me flinch.
It was
Flat
And quiet,
But my shaking hands did not make it quiver as well.
Your voice hit me like a freight train
And spattered my soul upon the softly lit walls
And I answered you with short, monotone whispers
Staring at my own black eyes in the mirror
Trying to find a person inside them,
But I couldn't.
For that moment
I was a shell
Staring at an empty reflection.
I stared and she stared and even together
We couldn't add up to anything close to alive.
It was like being turned to stone,
Like being flash frozen.
Like already being dead and feeling your limbs cool and stiffen.
As you spoke
I got more
And more
And more
Still
Until only my eyes and lips moved
In the mirror.
My breaths were shallow
Because my lungs were paralyzed-
Stuck
At the size they'd been
When you dialed my number.
You
You
You
It echoed off the walls when I hung up.
You
You
You
You
You
And if I'd been able to
Maybe I'd have cried,
Or smiled,
Or gotten sick or collapsed.
But instead I stared at my own blank,
Smooth,
Paralyzed face in somebody else's bathroom mirror,
Tried to make my eyes blink.
Tried to make my chest rise and fall.
Tried to arrange these
Suddenly unfamiliar features
Into something that wouldn't terrify the people
Waiting for me in the living room.
Waiting to care.
Waiting to comfort.
Waiting to fail.
You
You
You
Are the only thing that can reach inside of me.
You
You
You
You
You
I heard it, tinny and layered. It filled that little room
With its smartly matched sink and tiles
And its soothing light gold walls.
It painted everything
A corroded white,
Powdery and metallic tasting,
And the ceiling
Bent.
And I
Stared at my black eyes in the mirror,
Too numb to reach the fear
Or the hope
That I knew was coursing through my veins.
Since that night,
Those two missed calls
Have remained missed.
Remained a little reminder
To throw patterns on my walls in the middle of the night.
I can't
Delete them.
I can't
Resolve them...
They changed my life.
They stay.

I feel so...

Silenced.