there's a boy in my bed
who was not there before.
i left for a short while
and rushed back to find a rubber band
boy stretched from my headboard
to the foot of my bed.

i'm afraid that he will snap
or maybe i'm afraid i will
because i've been wrought so tight
my chest is collapsing in on itself
but the sight of the boy in my bed, well,
it loosens my strings.
(and rubber always bounces back.)

this rubber band boy has played
me before; he knows all the melodies
i will sing to him and he will croon back
and it is the duet i have always wanted:
the one where neither of us make a sound.

i let the boy in my bed stretch
his rubber band arms around me,
rub up and down my back
because i am wracked with sobs
because i am panicked and broken
because i am the scratched record

i can only play the first few lines
of the same song: 'wise men say
only fools rush in';
the rest of it flies over my head
and hits rubber.
so he finishes the song for me:
'i can't help falling in love with you.'
i can't help but think
that i would **** this boy senseless.
(i'd **** him up too, i always **** it up).

they call condoms 'rubbers' in North America but
that's wrong. (they're latex.)
they call erasers 'rubbers' in the UK. (correct.)
Our culture gap reflects us well.

I need, ache, to prevent mistakes from happening
but I have ******* myself over too often;
even latex cannot save me.
He is there when the mistakes are made,
over and over again,
rubbing them out until they're nothing but
shavings, little bits to be blown off the sheet,
cut out from the final piece.

i can only hope i prevent myself
from becoming the mistake
he must erase from himself.

if i never get to be the opera,
let me be a song,
a verse,
a single note.

perhaps he won't remember me at all,
just the bed he's stretched himself in.
maybe what i'll be in his composed works
is a well-placed
rest.

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory—
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

You probably understand. Or maybe you don't, after all. Either way, it is jumping around inside me and if I don't let it out soon all my carbonation will fizz up and run over the side of my glass and I don't want to waste all that sweetness.

I want to kiss you underwater.

I want that kiss to be the only thing keeping us alive. Down there we are foreigners, aliens. Grasping, I want to feel your flesh in stark contrast to the smooth wetness all around me, like a secret.

All that life where we cannot live. Exotic, forbidden, so lovely. I am sick with love.

Take a road trip in my heart my dear, the highways are all marked.
Head down any route you choose, where every onetime romance sparked.

Just in case you won't remember, take a picture of my heart.
Get close - catch all the little cracks from where it broke apart

But I stumbled through the red tape, built the infrastructure new.
Now with tearful eyes and outstretched arms,
I give the key to you.

Ride through my heart with all the lumps in it, they fell down from my throat.
See the well from which I've drawn out every word I ever wrote.

Take a souvenir from my heart, it's something you must do.
It's risky but I have to trust a piece is safe with you.

If you held it close to your heart that would probably be best,
it might be warm and safe there if it's pressed against your chest.

Please leave my heart quite carefully or never leave at all.
If i keep giving pieces out it may end up too small.

Something happened this morning
when I awoke to you lightly breathing.
It was sublime.
My chin rested on your shoulder
the skin so soft on my cheek.
I couldn’t help but kiss the sweetness.

On nights when I sleep alone
it does not matter how many blankets
wrap my restless body.
I wake cold.
Nothing is as warm as your arms.
Like that of a Texas breeze
on an August night.

I can only think to kiss
your unshaven face.  
The kisses are planted gently,
first your cheek,
then your temple,
and your forehead,
when I come to the tip of your nose
you stir slightly,
but I cannot stop.
I want it more then
the ocean waves need
the shoreline to crash upon.

Looking at your face
I smile at the odd way we met.
With a breath of *** and an intoxicated
grin we spoke.
“I don’t like you”
“Yea? Well I don’t like you first!”
Like children picking
on their first crush.
Tying to fight back the giggles.
Our childish ways still
run strong.

In your absence I sit
and watch the ticking minutes
laugh at my uneasiness.
Hours with others
are mere minutes with you.
The clocks envy
our cherished time
and tick-tock more rapidly
when we are alone.
All our time
would never be
enough.

When we get lost in each other,
the way the lonely roadrunner
looses himself as he runs
up and down
the oak covered hills,
it is love at its best.

This morning
when the soft breathes
you took woke me
and my chin rested upon
your shoulder,
something happened.
As the kisses fell
and your eyes continued to sleep;
I realized that this
is where I belong.
Drifting slowly  
into love with you.

The brain is a pretty rad little doodad. Sitting atop your neck, buzzing with blood and budding thoughts like an apple tree in spring.
I think it's fascinating that we're still quire clueless as to how it really works.
There's one particular part that still fascinates me, namely, memory.

Memories are the cranial equivalent of keeping a diary or writing in a journal. a collection of feelings and happenings of days gone by and words once said.
There are a few journal entries, if you will, that stand out to me. Ones I made with a girl... let's call her B.

If B were here right now, I'd look her in her big brown eyes and ask her:

Do you remember?

Do you remember the divine way the curves of your body fit into mine was we lay in an amorous embrace amongst the blankets and downy pillows?

Do you remember the way I told you a million times that I loved your hair. Your angelic, graceful hair, even though you thought it was too long and too messy?

How we walked through the forest for hours, talking about nothing and nonsense, and how we sat on a log for what seemed like eternity until I manufactured enough courage to finally kiss you?

They say that elephants never forget, and every time you cross my mind I feel my nose getting a little longer and my skin turning a little greyer.

Do you remember? Because I sure as hell do.

Do you remember how adorable you looked in those pajama pants of mine that were about a foot too long for you because you forgot to bring your own?

Do you remember how we sat on a bench and watched the birds flit from feeder to feeder as the sun waved us a crimson farewell?

Do you remember the feeling of your lips upon my lips, and the simple fact that it is impossible to properly describe that in any banal combination of 26 tired characters?

Do you remember the bittersweet intermingling of the smells of my eighty dollar cologne and your forty dollar shampoo?

Do you remember the way we looked into each other’s eyes? The vast universes of possibilities leaping from neuron to neuron behind those irises?

Wonderful memories. Pleasant memories. You couldn’t ask for anything better than these kind of memories. But there’s more. And there’s a reason why they’re just memories.

I remember the way the blood drained from my face like your used bath water circled the drain in my bathtub, and how my heart went on strike and stopped beating when you told me we couldn’t be together.

I remember how similar the crunch of the leaves and twigs under our booted feet sounded to the cracking and shattering of my sanity as you drove away on that sombre day.

I remember all of the dreams my brain pumped out of its pitiful pineal gland in a futile attempt to travel back in time.

I remember the empty spot in my bed and the gaping and gushing hole in my heart that still exists
To
This
Day.

But for all of these melancholy memories, these rotten ruminations, the beast of anger has yet to rear its matted mane.

In fact,

I thank you.

I thank you for this sadness, this regret, this longing, and this acute absence of rage,

For it is proof that I am alive.

I thank you for this sorrow, for this awful ammunition, for inspiration to machine masterpieces from the melancholy.

For what is light without darkness?

What is life without death, and love without loss?

So thank you.

I look back on our shared seconds not with eyes full of misplaced malice and fury,

But with gratitude.

Because even through tragedy

The heart survives.

I ruminate confined in my white room
about what is too much to now confide,
in you, the she who left more than perfume.
Forgive me if these words seem qualified:
It only took one week of sleep by you...
habitualized embracing through a dream.
and now deprived of contact all night through,
tonight is longer than all nights beside you seem.
Despite your sweet suggestions, I can't sleep,
I think a thousand thoughts all at one time-
So, though I need not hours we tried keep,
I'll use them now to write you verse and rhyme.
It seems there's nothing else that I can do,
for while I toss and turn, thoughts turn to you.

It kills me that I can't keep you in words,
The more I write the more I seem to miss.
Like meaning from my pen is far off lured,
I can't put down your smile, your eyes, your kiss.
A kiss that for my life I can't describe,
despite how hard I try or oft I write.
Transform me hence into your willing scribe,
I'll work to make dark ink match your eyes light...
and though I know I'll fail I still write on,
hoping beyond hope that I'll succeed
in writing down some truth before I'm gone,
one truth might then find others and so breed.
Not unlike I found you and you found me
or how our I's met up to forge a we.