Ruby red converse
Rust coloured jacket
With the collars pulled down to
Expose your collarbones
The freshly painted ink engraving
Is stark against your skin
Once again you’ve proved that
You can commit to art
Yet not to another soul
Looking for the reasoning behind
The ways your eyes turn to amber
Liquid every time you’re scared
You kept those secrets in a box
Labeled in green sharpie with
DO NOT LET THE SUN TELL WHY
Every time I see you,
On occasion at our bus stop
The one where we traded coffees
And shared donuts
I reach up to adjust the
Scarf around my neck
You kissed the spot above
My neck bone with too much
Stardust on your lips
Now in scattered letters
It spells out your name and
I can’t have people knowing
That you were once my rain
On a dessert land
Dry for days
The wet came with rescue
Ladders in the late afternoons
I aligned myself with
Treetops caressing leaves
And far too many thorns
Live with me again
Show me what its like not
To be sunless on the
Floweriest 11 a.m. mornings
My friends started asking
Why there is only one pair
Of shoes by the door
Instead of two
I tell them the speed
One walks at is ever changing
And not to marathon wearing
Stars on your feet

Towers popping out of holes and gaps and
Missing parts of time like
They were built from lemon juice and
All the right clock pieces
Really they’re salty regrets from the
Seconds we carefully lost
In silver keys and gold buttons
Engulfing most of the trees we
Attempted to plant
If you give artificial
You do not receive authentic
So even the most opaque ebony nights
Won’t knock on your window
When all you caused were transparent
Plastic tasting [blue purple clouds]

Rain has never trickled
In my veins like you have,
With your motorbike and
Wheels that go rounder than
Your eyes when you're
Gazing at the twinkling stars
In the pitch black skies
That smell like purple metal
During midnight
When you're laughing with
Your head thrown back
Black locks sway across your forehead
And no moon can begin to
Compare to your glow
You’re my
Ecstasy of a drug
My hidden escape
All I want is
Empty parking lots at 2am
And cold coffee
Even on a winter day
So make it snow
You’ve caused enough flurries
In the back of my mind
The holes in my stomach
Avalanches on avalanches
In the galaxies of my fingertips
Your strength is enough to keep
All the glaciers from melting
Tell me about the time you felt most free
I think I’m tied down to the warmth
That radiates out your smile
Even when you spit the coldest stories
From the days of burnt cigarettes
And vacant, abandoned shopping carts

I really did sit there pulling out brick after brick
When I was told that there are stories in every masterpiece
I'm on the 67th story and yet I see the same words engraved in every piece:
One doesn’t break someone down to build themselves up
One doesn’t light fires just to smell the smoke
And one doesn’t close themselves off so someone else can search for them.

I mistook the candles burning in your veins
For popsicles on a day like July 16th
On the plains of a desert in Dubai
You always cooled the smoke around me
Always kept me from ferrying the wrong way
Even on the hardest to fly occasions
But I didn’t see
(I guess you were burning so bright
That I always took it for your natural light
Like the moon at 12:47 am)
That you were aching so hard you left burnt marks on me
I’m sorry I ran to the ice-cream truck
When what you really needed was an ambulance

Quarters spill from my pockets
Contrary to the ways my lies never do
The thickness in lemonade cuts my tongue
& The edges from freshly broken pieces
Try to dissect the 36 syllables in
Your words strung together
By bare teeth and neon truths only the
Moon’s craters ever get to hear,
I'm here but I'm not the gold of the
Moon, I'm a spinning solar system
& You are all the orange waves in the
Oceans breathing life into cold stillness
Still I can't swim because I refuse the
Possibility to drown
But I don’t need water to feel like
I'm sinking & these coins make me heavy
Like your name make me light
How can I be planets when your
Eyes are silver galaxies

I can find the morning in your light,
Yesterday the shore disappeared from the palm of my hands
You told me flowers only grow on soil and dirt
But there are gardens growing on the
Insides of your rib cages under the sun that only
Rises but refuses to set, your eyes encompass the
Elegance that never leaves the stars and guides
Constellations back to their origins, you carry
Warmth in the lowest of hazy nights on the
Tips of your fingers where galaxies have been
White before they turn to dust
I swam through a green ocean and
Landed on your shore
Your scent still lingers through smoke
Even water could not drown me the way
Your words do
Melting far more marshmallows than
I can carelessly burn

Door’s open, walk into a hallway to cinnamon scents
And broken candies scattered on the table
I felt all your rays beneath the beats that brought me home
Back to gas fire places and engraved wooden floors
In these panels you kept secrets that telephone calls cannot decode
And we’re thunderstorms again
Through letters and postage stamps you learned that
Bones and old maps of veins don’t like being set on fire
In waters made of dust particles and stale sunshine
You could be planting exit signs on the stones you trip over
And the words you burn under your tongue
Silver coated and kissed with burning coal
You missed a step but this is your firewood
Just remember to take your lighter with you the next time you leave

You’re gliding on ice that’s sprouting
Flowers like the freckled mountaintops down south
But you haven’t noticed the red that’s started to cover
Spreading on the bottom of your plate
If you did this with fire maybe you’d still be alive
But this is a new kind of electricity angled towards you
Like the stroke of a brush that whistles
Something that sounds like letters
And open doors at the end of mile long pathways
You are an exit route not a fire escape
Does your mother know why you keep empty water bottles
On the desk by the back door and not the one by your bed
Swearing that you are sinking into tides that keep you afloat
I saw the run rise in your eyes once
The yellow and green awoke something in your smile
And a streetlight’s glow burned out
Coated in silver, immersed in purple petals
Yet the plastic stuck in your throat
Is lodged between adventure and fear
And you don’t want to jump

Laurie says that in high school
people used to call her ocean
everything she did came in waves

she tells me that she never crashes in the right places
I want to tell her to crash on me
that my heart will be
nothing short of the perfect shore

I know that my beaches are covered in rocks
that have not yet softened to sand
so instead I warn her
I am too afraid to swim