I have a secret
That I dare not even whisper aloud.
It gnaws at me,
Makes me scared.
For years
My dream has been you.
For years and years, every single falling star
Has had your name attached.
Every wish I made
Was you.
Everything I wanted
Was you.
If somebody asked me
At any moment in time
What it was I wanted most in the entire world,
I would have instantaneously answered:
You.
And the thing that scares me so,
That I dare not say with my lips,
Is that
The other night
A star fell
And I wished
With my entire soul
To be with her.
And now,
Now if someone were to ask me
What I want more than anything in the world
More than breath
More than life
More than home
I am trying to avoid knowing
That my answer
Is no longer
You.

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.

You say I don't have to worry.
When we were laughing, happy,
And I said, "I'm trusting you."
I meant in all things.
When I sealed it with a kiss,
I meant
I am trusting you.
Trusting you the way I have only ever trusted
One other person.
One other,
Who dragged me through hell and repented,
Whose every ugliness and cruelty I saw and accepted,
Who I know better than I know myself.
It took that to trust her,
It took seeing every corner of her for me to give her
What I am handing you right now.
You are still shrouded in secrets, in uncertainty.
I've not seen your darkness, only heard that maybe it exists.
In so many ways
I don't know you.
But looking into your eyes
I trusted you
And I trust you
And here,
Here you go:
Here is every night I lay awake, my stomach twisting in knots,
Fearing that you'll forget me.
Here is every morning I wake up
And try not to bother you too soon into the day,
Fighting the irrational panic that if I don't hear that you exist
You'll have been only a dream.
Here is every midnight I will spend wandering in the cold
Looking for ghosts of us together in the dark
Wondering what you are doing halfway around the world under the same moon that paints the snow silver here.
Here is every doubt I have.
I trust you.
Here is my faith.
It is never given lightly.
But I love you.
And since I do,
I have the choices:
Trust you
Or don't.
I will love you either way.
I will fear you either way,
And what this trust means is that
I have found a new kind of courage.
When I am sad, or scared,
When my day has raked me over the coals,
When I am forced to my knees, and have to get up all alone,
I will allow the thought of you
To comfort me.
I will let you in
In my darkest hours
And let the light that fills up every inch of me when you touch me
Return without you
And warm me.
You may never know what this means from me-
You've not seen me guard myself like a fortress for eighteen years.
You've not seen me refuse to let anything comfort me
In fear that if I rely upon it
I will lose it and be unable to survive.
You've not seen me suffer silently, grimly, stubbornly
For months
Just so I will have done all the getting-up
Myself.
This trust, this faith,
This is the most precious thing I have.
And I gave it to you,
Laughing.

We exist in a world filled with people who beg every day for love.
For connection. For tenderness. For attention.
And yet, try giving it to them.
Try being someone else's design, the one who will give everything to them.
They are like children who wish to eat an entire chocolate cake and regret it halfway through.
They make themselves sick on love.
And we, the ones who have been made to fit the idealistic wish, find that we have been very cruelly misled.
We have been created for a world which does not exist,
And for people who are only capable of receiving the affection we offer
In their dreams.
There are two types of people in the world:
Those who wish for love, and those who are the wish for love.
And neither is ever satisfied,
Because both believe the other is designed for them,
When in reality, they are simply alone.
The lonely ones find the people who will make them lonelier.
The clingy ones find the people who will surely reject them.
The lovers find the people who will abuse their affections.
The dreamers of true love find the people whom they wish could fulfill their wishes,
Not the people who can.
And the people who can find the people who cannot appreciate a dream come true.

We are tragedies, my darlings.
We reject ourselves and one another.
I am aiming to be better, to give what I can. But most of the time?
I just feel like a freak, with my emotions.
Even when they are not directed at you, you feel their threat looming and shy away.
The real reason I am so very easy going?
It is a disguise. An apology to the world for loving it too much.
Not even that- for being ABLE to.
It is restraint based on respect.
Even when I put up the walls of "it's all okay" and "leave if you want",
Somehow they all feel the pressure of the something that is wrong with me.
What is it?
Why do the books all worship love like mine, but the people all fear it?
I watch these people grovel and plead for love,
Love that I can give,
And I sit and hold my tongue, because I know by now.
After all this time,
I finally know that they do not want what they ask for.

They just want to ask for it.

How ironic that some people run before they even truly see in me what there is to run from.
I am kind, perhaps too kind for you,
But I am not what you see.
I would be too sweet if not for my core.
I hide a quiet sort of watchfulness,
The sort a snake has before it strikes, the sort a jaguar has when it sees prey and all the world narrows and compresses to a point
Just out of distance.
I am not the blood. I am the teeth.
And I lie down with lambs who think they're lions, let them walk on me, let them lead.
How much easier people are to know when they think you weak!
And I have no need to use my power, no agenda, no want it would serve to let my nature slip.
Why then should I rise and bare my teeth?
Let them pass, let them sleep,
I have more to hunt than pride and fear:
I could make you kneel but WHY?
To be feared is not to be loved.
To be feared is not to be respected.
If I do not have your respect when I am small
It means nothing when I have expanded,
When I grow tall and loom, my shadow throwing darkness over your pale, surprised face.
All my life with this strong, lithe, wild thing I have lived
And it has crouched within me,
Waiting.
Sometimes it snarls, sometimes it tenses with such an urge to spring
That I must turn away and hold my head to hold it in,
But never once have we-
My beast and I-
Found a reason great enough to strike.
Although inside I move with the easy grace
Of something that knows it was born
To rule
To win
Something so settled in power that it has no need to show itself,
Although beneath my brittle china bones and porcelain skin
There lies another layer-
That of sinew and of black inky vigilance,
A sentient shadow.
Within me is that of claws and talons, that of fangs
That of such perfect, suspended stillness...
Within me lies the moment before the candle goes out
Within me breathes already a last breath
Within me is the moment before a kiss
And the moment before the taking of a life
All at once
All the same moment, in the end,
And yet
I kneel.
And yet I give,
And yet I choose love.
And even from this softened form, this gentle disguise
They flee.

Have you ever heard a song
So sweet that lyrics would corrupt it?
So pure that you hold your breath
Afraid you'll shatter it just by sighing?
It's a torn feeling, an unnameable feeling, the description of which can only lead you in circles
Hopelessly tangled in the desire to express it.
It is something so excruciatingly, frustratingly ineffable that you can't even move, frozen in awe, locked in a complex, pressurised longing.
Something
So achingly lovely that just the thought of it 
Pulls tears from you in diamond threads
And makes you, briefly, a shimmering echo of it,
Lit
From inside.

I say this
Even though I know that trying to describe that feeling
Is like trying to grasp at mist
I say this
I say it because
I felt like that in your arms.

I looked at you
In the half-light
And just for a second I saw you fully, in a new way.
The light loved you.
It slid along your skin like it came from the stars
And not from a bedside lamp propped against the wall.
You were so smooth, so soft, tendrils of hair escaping their pinnings and following the long lines of your neck.
Your eyes gleamed through your smile,
And all the sweetness and wit and beauty behind them,
All of that that I could touch, all that art looking at me in that moment, like having a symphony play for just you,
That soul under that skin, a whole galaxy of loves and hates and dreams and insecurities coursing through you...
And me
An inch away
Less
Pressed up against you like a parallel universe, so near and so sacred and so shockingly tangible-
The heat of you, so solid but so pliable next to me, so much a part of me that nothing about me could feel empty.

I couldn't breathe for joy, suddenly.

You could have been the moon, just then,
Or a goddess, like one of those smooth, white, subtly glowing statues in the museum halls,
Women I always imagined came alive at night and basked in the starlight,
Absorbing it to throw it back upon the world when day broke.
Your fingertips on me traced patterns
And I wanted them to touch me deeper
Wished my body was more my soul than flesh can be
So that I could feel yours in your hands.
It was too much!
It was
Not enough.
And I laughed, hid my face in your neck, felt your pulse there and how fragile your collarbones were.
I wanted to seep into your skin like rain.
I tried to shrug past it
But the feeling grabbed me by the shoulders and shook the words out of me,
And suddenly I was cheek to cheek with you,
Confessing...

After that the way I touched you changed.
I don't know if you felt it,
But I did.
It had been coming, sneaking up on me, all that day.
In my arms, beneath my palms, I held something so unutterably precious
Whenever I held you
And I knew it fully then, unable to unfeel it.
It made me tender in a way that pierced my heart
In a way that scared me
Because it felt like why I'm here.

If someday I get to tell you I love you
I will tell you that it was that moment when I knew for sure I would.
That moment when it all became so crushingly, beautifully real to me-
When gravity shifted, and you began to pull me instead.

I want to go home.
Not the artificial one in my head,
Or the temporary, fleeting one
In the comfort of your arms.
I want home
What home is supposed to be.
I want somewhere, or someone, or something
That I can go to
And feel okay
No matter how not-okay I am.
I want something, someone, somewhere
That is always there, always available, always certain.
Not a treatment, a quick fix, a medication
For a fragmented heart
And a shuddering soul.
A home.
I want a home.
Is home too much to ask for?

I have a home in my own heart when I think of you.
For the first time,
I have a home I hold inside me.
Because of loving you, I am a little bit home
Wherever I go.

The world says that hope is feeble.
That it's like an ember buried in the ashes of a quenched fire,
Tiny but glowing, fragile in the vastness of midnight.
But I think that hope is truly terrible not because it is easily extinguished, but because it ISN'T.
Hope is no danger, really, if it flares and fades like a little flame snuffed by a stiff breeze, but no.
Hope is underneath.
Hope lingers, long after the wreckage has been gutted.
After everything has been burned to ash,
After every cinder has died out there, and all that is left is a charred skeleton on the scorched ground and a pile of ashes,
After even the blackest ruin is once again cold, hope lives beneath.
An underground blaze ready to rise again at the smallest hint of fuel.
An errant twig, not yet blackened by flames, falls light as a feather, and ignites before it even hits the bed of ashes.
Hope LINGERS underneath, ready to pounce.
It waits.
It sticks around like ****** sticks, and you just can't get rid of the **** stuff, no matter how hard you try.
Hope CANNOT be killed, in some instances.
And people would go on and on, in their ignorance, in praise of such bravery,
Of such a courageous little match struck against the face of the night like a mockery,
But it's just not true.
The way a fire lives on beneath the ground of the places it has recently seared and withered
So that everything must be drenched before it is at all safe to step nearby,
Hope sinks below the ruins of the soul and burns slow and white hot.
Embers are not feeble, they are the hottest part of the fire,
They bite the deepest and they hold on with barbs beneath the skin, waiting.
Hope is supposed to be a pleasant word, full of righteousness and pride and purity.
But that's not what hope IS, only what we intended it to be.
What we wish it was.
Hope is a human concept, and as with all human concepts, it was created in perfection and evolved
Like a virus, took on a life of its own,
And became something altogether different and more menacing than it was ever meant to be.
Hope can keep you going, or it can slowly cook you.
It can sustain you, or poison you, for an entire lifetime.
Depends, you see, on just what it is you're hoping for.
Hope for a brave impossibility, and it's grand, yes!
Hope for a deceased dream, a buried love, a second chance, and, darling...
Hope kills.

Please don’t forget about me.

I have kept you in my mind

For quite a long time now.

Tried to convince myself you didn’t care,

Ended up just wanting you more.

So

Since I’ve exhausted my options

I’m just going to ask you

Simply

Unabashedly

With nothing left to fight with or against:

Please

Don’t forget about me.

See how she goes, so sudden, so sure.
See how she stepped close warily, in slow motion, scared to be burned,
Like it would never happen if only she never touched you.
You reach for her,
But oh,
Watch how she goes-
Like a lightning strike, like a high speed chase, like a roller coaster drop.
You'll all see her flee, sad souls like me.
Watch.
See how she goes.
But you don't see.
Cause she's already gone.

Oh, yes, I was in love with you.
I hadn't noticed,
I didn't know.
Someone else burned in my sky like the sun and blinded me,
But, still, quietly, you were there.
You were different.

I think I loved you because you smirked at me.
Because you cried to me.
I loved your mischief,
Your fragility.
I was mesmerized by your rawness, the tortured look deep in your eyes that made me want to hold you,
And captivated by your wit, and your playfulness, so jarringly out of sync
With your shattered-mirror soul.
You were so beautiful
And when I'd catch myself thinking it
I don't know how I explained my love away.
You could draw me in,
Hypnotize me
With your paradoxes-

You were made of glass, but you had the entrancing audacity
To dance anyway

And yes, I see now
That of course I was in love with you.

I don't go to church
Nor do I want to.
I don't believe
In anything in particular.
And yet the word god
Shows up in my poetry like it's put there intentionally.
It isn't.
Perhaps it is just that god
Is a perfect metaphor for how I love
And in trying to explain it,
The zeal of religion is the best comparison I can think of.
In fact
It makes me wonder,
If we are in god's image,
Is god
Like us?
Maybe that is why our prayers are seldom answered-
Maybe whatever god there is
FEARS us, for loving it so devotedly.
Maybe god is not dead.
Maybe god has fled.

It terrifies me
How easy it is to live without you.
That's the real reason
I try so hard to keep you close.
It doesn't make sense to me that this love
Could cool so.
That's why I cling.
That's why I panic.
That's why
I try
So hard.
I can't let you forget me
But worse
The worst
I can't let me
Forget you.
You left.
You left and it mattered.
You left and I grew without you
I learned without you
I became
Without you.
You left.
And although I fear that
Fear you
What I am... so much more afraid of
Is this:
Last year
You taught me
That you are
Unnecessary.
And I didn't want to know.

There was a secret I never wanted you to know...
That nobody
Hates me and my love
More
Than me.

I don't know why I love you so much.
That was never the plan.
It isn't safe, to love someone like this
And I always knew it.
But the way your hair curls down your cheeks when you've fallen asleep and it has escaped its pinnings
The way your eyelashes leave shadows down your cheeks
The way your eyes sparkle when you laugh
You hit something so beautiful and painful in my heart.
The way you are,
Everything about the way you are
Just tears me open with love.
When you cry, I long to wrap you in my arms and protect you from every pain you inflict on yourself.
It pulls me toward you, this need to show you with my skin that I belong to you.
Resisting it carves out a huge crater in my chest
As if more and more of me goes to you by the second
But I can't follow it and make myself whole again.
If I do this, if I succeed in these next few weeks,
If you continue to love me
And relearn how to touch me
It will have been the hardest thing I ever did for someone I loved.
If I smile at you and show you how happy you make me
And manage to hide how broken I am,
If I can survive it when you turn away from me in bed,
And pull away from my touches.
I've always said that not reaching for someone I adore
Is an act of unutterable love
And it has never been more true
Because you used to reach back,
You used to crave me like I crave you
Not ***, but closeness, oneness.
I live alone.
I have always lived alone.
And not for a second have I liked it.
I can count on my hands the number of times in my life I've felt at home and whole.
This
What I am doing for you
Trying to do
By giving you all the choice in this
This is the biggest, most difficult thing I have ever given anyone.
And if at the end I lose you
Make no mistake
I will have nothing. I know it. I fear it.
When I woke up this morning the terror of it took my breath away
Because my body knows.
And it won't be losing you that does it,
It will be these weeks,
These weeks and the strength I don't have, the hang on by your fingernails strength I will have to find
In order to keep my head above water and show you why you love me.
By the end of this
I will have used every failsafe I have,
Every life support, every backup plan
I will be stripped raw and naked inside, armorless and starved,
And if you go I will be more unprepared for the agony of losing you
Than I have ever been for any sort of pain.
It is my life I'm giving you, right now,
And it's impossible for you to understand unless you've felt this looming shadow that I live with
But I'm giving you
Every bit of energy I always save to keep myself alive when I am swallowed by the dark.
And I am... so afraid. So inexpressibly, mesmerizing afraid.
I am facing my absolute worst fear every second for all this time,
And it's important that I say that.
Because I've never done it for anyone.
I've never been able to.
And maybe sometimes I'll crack, and you'll see tears, and I'll reach for you.
But I swear to god I'd be less afraid to jump after you off a bridge than to do what I'm doing now.
In ways I would rather die, because it wouldn't take so long with so much fear.
And I have to say this, I have to, because whichever way this turns out
This tops every act of love I have ever done before
And every risk I have ever taken
And every fear I have ever faced.
You are more important to me than I could ever express,
And I love you enough to give you my life,
In every horrible, beautiful sense of the word.

I always wonder what it'd be like to belong to someone
Who would actually want to have me.
I've spent so many years of my life
Devoted
To people who weren't devoted to me.
Because
Well
I need to belong somewhere.
I need someone to wake up thinking of.
And it turns out
I need that more than I need to be valued
Or understood
Or even thought of.
I need it much more than I need to be loved.

And I try, I do, to exist as an island.
Sometimes I make it months before I fail
Spectacularly.
Sometimes I even forget how much I miss love.
But inevitably I remember.
And inevitably I fall in love
With people who don't fall in love with me.
Avoidance doesn't work,
Rushing in headlong to face my fears doesn't work,
Trying to be calm and subtle and normal...
Definitely doesn't work.

Frankly, I'm out of ideas.

Time after time I face this-
The fear, the vulnerability, the shadows of my past failures which loom around me.
I stay up nights
I make beautiful art
I cry
I laugh at nothing
I spend excruciating hours waiting and worrying for no good reason
I stop being hungry for food
But wander the streets like a starving animal all night
And for the past few months I've thought,
Isn't it nice to go to bed when I want to?
To not feel afraid all the time?
To have no one whose attention and affection I pine for?
(And believe me, pine is an understatement in even the mildest of cases for me.)
Isn't it nice to just be?

And maybe I didn't feel very alive,
Maybe my life was a little empty,
And my art untouched,
And my pages blank...
But I was hungry at every meal.
I woke up mornings feeling safe.
I felt sane.

Since I realized what it meant to love another person
It has been what I believe the purpose of my existence to be.
But what if I'm just... allergic to it?
What if it just makes me crazy?
And unstable?
And unsafe?
And exhausted?
What then?
And I still believe in love so much,
But after these past years
I have to wonder whether love
Believes in me,
Or whether I've just chosen to devote myself to
One
More
Thing
That... doesn't really care.

We hadn't seen each other for a year.
Before you kissed me
You smiled at me
With those sparkling blue eyes
(My heart
Stopped.)
And you said
"When I met you you said
It's okay, I'll probably be in love with you for like three years and then get over it.
It's been almost three years, maybe this is the end."
And I said,
"I was mistaken."
And kissed you.
But you're gone again
And I've decided.
I've decided
I wasn't mistaken.
I've decided
You were right.
This
Is
The
End.

How strange. Everything is just so...strange.
And what if you loved me, for real?
What if someday you decided that this love was what you wanted?
What then?
Would it be like it was? Would it be better?
Would I fall back into your arms and forget everything since you?
It scares me to think my other loves would be erased if you turned to me and said you wanted me.
It scares me, perhaps more, that they would not.
Can you imagine that?
Can you imagine, after these years,
You loving me and me loving you
And finally us finishing what we started but...
Me always loving someone else as well?
Honestly, it would be so horribly ironic that I think it might happen, just for that.
If I could have one of you, who would I pick?
How would I ever choose?
The girl I will love forever, or the girl who makes me feel like I'm flying every time she looks at me?
The security of you-have-seen-my-hell or the thrilling fear of you-could-create-a-new-one?
The romantic, dusky gold of the past, or the pure, hot silver of the future?
What if you ever kiss me again,
And I melt like I used to,
And you own my soul?
And... what if it happens,
And I don't...
And she owns it?

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.

Tell me again how hard it is
To be with someone
Who is not ashamed
To hold your hand
In front of his parents.

Did no one ever teach you shame?
They *did.
You must remember secrecy-
It's not as if you never knew it.
You lost to it.
Tell me how you write that off
As just
The way it is.
Tell me why you fight for the other things
And not for this.
I think
It's because you no longer have to.
Nobody avoids you if you shop for groceries with him,
Taking the adjacent aisle
So as not to interact.
None of your "friends" would rather
You two not cuddle on their couch at the party
Because not having to explain it to the other guests
Is just
Easier.
There is not a family dinner
You cannot bring him to
And sit beside him
Unabashedly.
Has it been so long that you've forgotten?
These are treasures
These normalcies.
These are trifles, if you have them
But if not
They erode, little sharpened grains of sand.
Don't mistake me-
It is no less valid
(Oh, according to the world, in fact, much more)
But
Don't you tell me
It's just as hard.

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.

My life
Is leaving you behind.
You, in that little town,
Me, being tugged and stretched
To fill an enormous world.
When I am across the ocean
When I live alone and leave everything behind
What then,
For you?
My life is leaving you behind.
But I can't.
I shouldn't still love you.
I shouldn't still wish for you.
And sometimes I don't...
But you have something of me.
I can't explain it.
There are new loves.
There are better loves.
But you are the background.
You are the foundation.
You're in the air,
You're on my skin
And you would never even touch it.
But somehow you still own it,
Every inch,
And I know what grief it will be
To see you grow up and fall in love
With someone else.
I know that to be near you forever
I will have to endure
So much more of that,
And on my weak days I wonder
Why everybody else gets a whole chance.
You, in that little town.
We don't belong to each other anymore.
But I will always belong to you.
I know there will be days
On London's cobblestone streets
That I will be unable to forget your face,
That I will worry and wish for you,
And I wish I didn't know
That I'll love you until the day I die.
I wish I didn't know
I'll be writing you poems when we're old and gray
And married to other people.
But I do.
I know it.
At the end of the day,
When I am stripped of everything
You remain
And that is the most comforting,
Devastating thing
I know about myself.

You tell me you're empty
And I know you want my sympathies
My acknowledgement of the problem
But all I can give you is the gawking gaze
Of a child on his first trip to the zoo
Leaving smudges on the snake tank as he tries to fathom
How something could be so alien and smooth and powerful.
You tell me you're empty
And all I can think is
That I have not a moment of my life to compare that to-
A day without suffering, without pain or danger,
Without that or joy so intense it tips right back over into treachery
I have no memory of any such day
To draw from for empathy.
I stand and stare at you
Empty you
And I know your sadness should be respected
And I know I shouldn't wonder so perversely
What it must feel like
Not to feel
But I can't help it
I feel like I'm standing on the other side of glass
Staring into the beady eyes of a boa constrictor
Wondering irresistibly
What its embrace must feel like for the mice it devours.
I know you are suffocating
But I
Am drowning
And I wonder
What empty feels like.

And forgive me for staring but I've never seen/eyes like yours, take my breath, and I guess what I mean is/I'd follow you down into hell and back home if you'd let me.
If you'd let me I'd give you the rain, and that moment at night when the sun has just set, and the stars/and I'd give you my heart and the air in my lungs and I'd walk out to meet you/it's never too far if I hear your voice at the end.
If you'd let me.
If you'd let me I'd draw you a city and when it was done it would rise off the page, and surround you/and I'd bring you flowers at 4 in the morning/because I can't sleep when I know you're upset...
And I know that I'm young/and I know that you're busy/I know that I'm not what you planned and it doesn't make sense/but the problem is when I'm around you my heart is a tympany drum and my mind is a mess/and the only thing in this whole world that I want is to see/you/smile.
So if you'd let me I'd like to be someone who stays up till 5:15 in the blue morning and watches the sunrise with you from a rooftop/and looks at you like you're a dream.
And I love when you stutter and trip like a brook on your words, little pebbles that tumble out jumbled/I love how you laugh and the way the world fades when you look in my eyes and take/my breath/away.
I'd like to be someone whose voice makes you smile, whose bad jokes cheer you up on your cloudiest days/whose eyes in the dark tell you "You're the whole world, and there's nothing so wonderful as your next phrase."
I love that you hug me for longer than I have expected whenever you leave me behind/and I love that sad moment when I linger watching you go cause I can't walk away when I know you're still there...
And I love all your scars and the way you've endured and I want to be all that you're missing.
And if you'd let me I'd love you through all of your faults and your petty mistakes and your failings/and I'd be the steadying arms every bad day and the voice that cuts through your self doubt to say you are amazing/and I'd be a love of your life because I'd be so sure that you'd always be just what I wanted/and I'd bring you flowers at 4 in the morning/because I can't sleep when I love you so much...
If you'll let me I'll be your adoring companion/here, quiet and sure that you're brighter than all of the stars/if you let me I'll love you with all of the parts of me I have held back and I'll give you the world/and the only thing in this whole life that I'll want is to see/you/smile...
If you'll let me.

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.

Since the sun first rose and spilled its golden light like nectar across the darkened fields.
Since the night first whispered soft along the ground and painted it deep blues and purples.
Since the rain first fell from the stars, and, gentle, infused the world with some of their light.
Since the moon first hung, pale and luminous, above the night muted world, filling the cracks and crevices with an echo of dawn.
I have known you since wind first breathed life into the trees and swayed them in their eery dance.
Since winter first chilled the world and hid its life away beneath the unyielding snow, and since spring first battled it back with the valiance of warm rains and sunny days.
Since thunder and lightning first hurled the the sky at the frosted ground, and cleaved the heavens in two, stripping away the world’s soft lines of defense.
Since the first balmy days of summer sighed into the mind and burst upon the senses like the sun captured here on earth.
I have known you
Since the clocks first caged time from its wanderings,
Since before the world was small, when wonder still waited behind every corner.
Since the veil between reality and dreams was just a dream itself.
Since the oceans first caressed the shores and ripped away leaving battlefields of ravaged shells.
Since the rivers first glowed crimson in the last rays of sunset, and since the seraphim first sprinkled dew upon the spiderwebs at daybreak.
Since before such ****** concepts as Good or Evil were picketed upon each creature,
Since nature ran wild and stopped at nothing,
Since the darkness first crept into a man’s heart,
I have known you.

Alone is a peculiar thing.
Sometimes on mornings like this, when I am sitting
At a lonely table,
Coffee in one hand to banish the cold,
Book in the other to banish the solitude,
I set them both down for a moment and
Ponder, stirring.
My spoon makes loud little clink-clinks,
And frothy pictures in the sweet steaming drink,
And I wonder:
How many separate mornings will I spend this way,
Having spoken to no one but woken at dawn?
Not a soul has heard my voice today, and it
Is nearly noon.
How many mornings of my life will be
Just like this?
A cup of coffee, a book,
And nobody looking about for me?
And am I lonely about it
Or just
Unsettled?

Do you have any idea how it feels
To have someone leave you in order to "protect you"?
And they always think they're the first one ever to do it too
Like there isn't a parade of cowards marching away
With excuses falling from their lips
When really
They're just scared that they could hurt someone so deeply.
I've got news for you all
The ones who leave
The ones who left
For my own good.
You didn't.
You don't.
You left for yours.
You leave
For yours.
You know as well as I do that my pain at being abandoned
Is a thousand times what any cruelty could have been
If only you stuck around to dish it out.
You just didn't
Want
To watch.
I have to watch.
Every time.
I have to watch it decimate the parts of me I've spent time nurturing.
I have to watch and know that you think
You saved me from you.
So let me tell you what being left for your own good feels like.
It feels like being used.
It feels like being patronized.
It feels like being disposable.
It feels like
Being condemned.
I'm brave enough to face the horrors inside of you.
Are you?

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.

Kiss me in the corner with the lights raking across our skin.
Kiss me until I forget her.
I dare you. I challenge you.
I'm asking you
Make her irrelevant
Make her insubstantial.
Make me forget her name.
Make me forget mine.
I'm begging you,
Touch me until I am different.
Pound that music through my chest like a stake
And **** what loves her
Because I can't.
Make me new. Make me the darkness between strobe lights.
****** me and bring me back, cold and hard like a jewel.
Breathe me in like smoke, toxic and rough.
Crush me like a soda can in the alley way.
I can take anything but this.
Kiss me until it doesn't hurt.
I beg you.
I dare you.
Demolish me.

You gave me roses when we met,
Little tiny tea roses, so very sweet.
I looked for the false one in your bouquet,
Too late realized you did only mean a week.

Their corpses lay yellow in my bedroom drawer,
And you lie far away from me,
I guess I must've loved you more,
To lay in my own lies like petals plucked
Innocently.

If I've only learned one thing from this life it's this.
If you love someone, say it, say it all the time. Say it twice.
Say it before every car ride, every plane trip, every night when you go to sleep.
If you love someone, make sure they know it.
Say it when you feel like you hate them and you're fighting and you're sad and hurt and you're about to part angry,
Say it,
Turn and yell it like an insult, "I LOVE YOU!"
And then storm out.
"I love you."
Because that's what matters.
Say it every rainy day doing puzzles in the living room,
Every ordinary moment in the grocery store buying bread,
Every chance you get. Say you love them.
If you love someone, say it.
You can never say it too much.
And whatever else I may have failed to learn
I do know that.

What must you think of me?
Dark
Hungry eyes
Full of hurt and hope,
And
All
That love,
So sudden.
I've never met someone like you.
I know you see it,
And yet somehow I think you believe it,
Receive it,
Understand.
And I don't know what to do,
Because
Nobody's ever known that
And not flinched from me
The way you recoil when your hand rests accidentally on a hot stove.
In your eyes I saw...
Joy.
I saw that you wanted
What was in
Mine.
And god,
I've been trying to recover from that ever since.
It makes no sense to me.
No sense.
You saw
You saw the secret.
It spilled out at your feet
And I wanted to fall to my knees there
And beg you to forgive it.
But your eyes never shamed me-
They glowed
(god I cannot unsee them)
With excitement,
As if maybe my touch shocked you
The way yours shocked me.
In that moment
You must understand,
And every other moment since
When your eyes have found mine
And burned my disguises to dust within seconds,
Every single thing I ever knew about myself
Was overturned.
That's why I can't get you out of my head.
Why I'm scared,
Why everything I do now is a little shaky and uncertain in my mind,
Because everything
Is new.
I based my life on the knowledge that I had to hide.
Everything I was sure of, everything that had been
Proven
Time and again to me
By never being disproved
Dissolved in that moment.
You razed it to ash.
When you touched me with tenderness,
I fell apart.
When you kissed me,
I lost everything
I've been wanting to shed
For my entire life.

A kiss is just a kiss.
Unless it's not.
Your hands are only hands,
But they're not.
Not when they're tangled in mine.
There is nothing else in my life that fills me with such joy that I think I will disintegrate
Just because
How can flesh and blood and bones
Possibly hold a feeling like that?
I tell you you're killing me
But that's what I mean.
It's not the fear that I'll lose you
That makes me wonder if I'll live for another minute.
It's the bliss that you are near me.
It's not what it sounds like-
It's not pain.
It's so much joy that my hands shake.
I don't think we were made-
Fragile as we are-
To feel things like the things you make me feel.
When you touch me,
I am unmade for a moment,
And it is exquisite.
Maybe you think I see you through pain and fear
But those
Are only my defense
Against the idea that I could feel so safe, and so complete,
And so perfectly happy that
The smile in my heart could break every bone in my insignificant shell of a body
If it were to crash over me in full.
Maybe I'm scared of that,
Of the fact that when you look at me
Every part of me, down to the atom, thrills with electricity.
Maybe you think I hate myself, abused and tossed aside,
And that is partially the truth,
But when you look at me and smile
I love every cell of me
And they all love me back
And together we decide that nothing that can be touched with fingertips
Is possibly vast enough
Or durable enough
Or beautiful enough
To hold the feeling of looking back at you.
A kiss is just a kiss
Unless it pulls you apart by the molecule
And lets the light shine in on all the little tiny spaces between.
This body is no instrument fit to play the song I hear when I touch you.
This beating heart is no vessel for how alive I feel when you pull me closer.
I am too tall not to fall to my knees and gaze up at the lines of a face I love madly,
But I am too small to hold that love
Far
Far too small.
That's what I mean to say.

They told me to cry
However I could
And I said your name into the floor
I'm sorry
I'm sorry
I'm sorry
You have many names
To me
And I said that one to the smooth wooden boards
Against my cheek.
I'm sorry
Is what I call you
At night before I go to sleep
And when I wake up in the morning.
All of your names can pull tears from me
But that one
Works the best.
Sometimes you are god
And sometimes you are lover
And sometimes you are the universe
In its vastness
Brighter than all the stars
But always I can call you
I'm sorry
And know that you will hear me.
I'm sorry
I'm sorry
I'm sorry
Sign your name into my ribs
So that it may touch every breath I take.
They asked me to cry
And I cried.
And when I rose
Your name sank through my chest and into my stomach
Like a stone
And it is still there,
Cool and unyielding
But solid.

The places I feel it when you're gone.
I didn't know you could.
It's like vertigo,
Like that sensation when your chair tips,
Only in the oddest places.
In my hands, and they go a bit limp,
Unable to hold things like they should
As if they've forgotten how.
Sometimes my teeth ache, like I've just eaten something sweet and cold, and it spreads down my jaw and makes my head spin.
Things that shouldn't have vertigo- my bones,
My feet,
My lungs.
It's disorienting. It's a little scary.
But at the same time I hold onto it,
Proof that you mean something,
Proof that you have changed me inside
So drastically
That nothing knows how to work quite right anymore.
I have rarely ever needed comforting like I need it now
But how to ask...
And so I sit within my strange new body
That seems to be rediscovering the entire world
At a pace a bit too slow
To seem normal
And I wait for you
And I know that the second I see you
I will be on solid ground again.

I'm going to create for you
A hundred thousand stars
Stuck here on earth like pinned butterflies.
I'm going tear them free of their frames
And leave, in their absence, white spaces stamped on the age-yellowed wall
That's been just waiting for someone to break
All that prison glass.
I'm going to uncrucify those pure silver shimmering constellations
And send them shooting through the sky
And they will shatter everyone's heart who dares to glance up,
And even they will not express the exquisite joy of being unmade-
The ecstatic, mad exhilaration of the thought of you.
I am going to make you a constellation.
I am going to make you an angel.
No,
I am going to make you God
And Satan too.
I am going to make you everyone I've ever met
And everyone I've ever wished I could meet but didn't have the words
To pray for.

I am going to search for you
In every face I ever see
And anything I find there of you will strike a spark so dazzling it blinds.
And everywhere those people walk they will set fires
And all the tourist maps in their flimsy metal racks will burn with avenues and crossplaces of light
And the world over will be stretched across with searing cords that cut the paths you've touched
And everybody will know that their city streets are threaded through with hot silver because you
Looked at me.

I'm going to make you the exact moment
When the lightning hits the tree,
The only moment of its life that it truly feels,
And the last.

That devastating
And that perfect.

I am going to make you the white hot slow burn of desert sand in the bleaching sun
That purifying
And I am going to make you the sweet relief of rain seeping into the earth,
That vital.

I know what you are.
I know your limitations.

I strip you of them.

You've nowhere to hide.
I am going to make the thought of you into a living flame.
I am going to think of every second you have ever taken a breath-
Every
Single
One-
As a revolution
As a rising sun
As art.

I am going to love you with the same level of desire that every living thing has ever felt
For its continued existence.
And there is not
A **** thing you can do to stop me.