Who are you outside of my apartment door?
Someone with the capacity to entertain sadness
other than yours. You don't tell others what they already know- hating yourself is counterproductive. You can show patience
for an over-apologizer who cannot catch their breath. You're an expert at comfort as your tongue grows bouquets of lilacs to soothe, whispering sweet nothings. You believe in that place to plant them.
You're nobody's apparition but mine. So I welcomed your black shoes and wiped them off in the welcome mat of my brain matter.
Those footprints aren't yours, just as you don't eat animals alive, but you still are
and I am just a bone.
You're not in search of something to taste. You are merely repulsed by the thought of the remains. You simply love more because of your sophisticated palette.
You paddleboat on the coast, secretly embarrassed to admit you're happy, but cannot help condemn the curve of your lip. You hate to admit it, but you are someone who enjoys being alive. You think being a nihilist is a choice; someone just wakes up one day with the will to withdraw while indulging
the world without consequence. You don't poison yourself just to withstand two hours in the same room. You find vigor in the softness of the skin that is not mine, you feast, but you share a table.
You have your sunglasses on- they aren't atop the fireplace where I kept them safe in my backpack. I wished I had kept them. I believe the vengeful spirit will always come back for what was theirs. But that is not who you are.
And it would really just be another reason
to see you again.
You are someone who returns, but not to my arms.

I see your parched lips
like that of a dying rose,
the small cracks forming
are like an indentation of their own.

You speak in that same tone they once called me,
as if it isn't patronizing
to be treated as a child,
despite having adult skin.

This treatment makes me wiser
of the cruelty of love
or even the fear in thinking it exists.
The lost luster,
apparent just in this one bad day
and I remember the reoccurrence of rain,
with its strange heat smacking my face
I wore the same look you have now.

The feeling of leather,
the hurt of words,
an admission in not knowing what one was doing even in their creation.
It is not a need,
to water our own flowers that wilted so long ago.

I have established their presence,
but we still try.
Life blossoms through you,
those opportunities
the talent,
the potential
and urge to believe
you can trust somebody
to do better than you’re doing yourself.

There it is,
this beautiful symptom
and these gardens the cause.
The same thirst
we all died from as a sprout,
same blood we shared
being clipped too soon and
placed in a vase.

To shrink my resentment for
how open wounds heal faster
than any other part of me. The heart
is the last to leave the fight; blood, carnage
always willingly bright eyed
and bushy tailed at the idea
of opportunity. These eyes,
wet + tired of having to see,
to blink. My heart to
believe I write
things worth reading. This brain
to avoid the guilt in
taking up space in my skull
where words rented out vacancy.
My tongue, encouraged to
speak something meaningful
enough to save every life,
but mine. These stupid
words, verse like munchausen syndrome.
I cannot breathe or survive
on poetry. Why
would I ever want these words
to draw your blood? They already siphon mine with poison. I am already
guilted with anxiety and creation
remains only as rumination.

Already lost myself. There
is no beauty and
I can't make everyone
else lose me too.

I'll wake up
this afternoon
write something happy,
manifest it as truth.
believe in it like
a scar compensates
enough to prove
pain to be real. Like
this ink
proves I'm insistent
that I bleed.

At sixteen, I was easily impressed with conversations of tattoos, septum rings, and pipedreams that internal biases created a tendency to wonder if you’d smoke those too in the art room.
When you spoke of the desire for a “creation of Adam painting to be inked across the canvas of your arm.”
I was enchanted though, unaware my embrace and unorthodox philosophy of loving the dead back to life would never work; I mourned in consumption of you and remained in a ramshackle shelter where we had class together.

An oxymoron, truly.

There was something sinister that washed down the room's rusted sink than your murky paint water. Every day, as if on schedule I lamented the opening of my veins in preparation for the inevitable.
You re-arranged yours with the help of a syringe and my mind questioned how best to save your life.
The focus of my grief was full of wonder in who would die first, but at least loved.
I began to know, the meaning of fixation so well, my lips tasted different even a shared laugh felt pathetic, but not as much as knowing neither of us could drive.
I became your girlfriend Suicide, experienced and immersed in toxicity.
I hated myself so passionately in undoing myself so vigorously all in act of loving you.
Breaths were not allowed unless you said so.
My world became the word "sorry"- your prevalent command, love should not make you guilty in having a heart that beats.
But it was like a ******* thunderstorm when you opened your mouth,
"Are there are any tats you want?"
  I remember you asked.

Today, I am aware of just how little I knew what I wanted.
I had sworn it was my mother's birthdate in Roman numerals, you disapproved and all in the spirit of mourning... I compensated and titled every poem about you in a similar fashion with the day we met,
but these journals had become a grave and shared spaces a graveyard.
Until sixteen, I was incapable of understanding this kind of ache.
I lied to myself,
that the mourning ceased in this season of my life, worse- I was your Adam.

An everlong ache.
I wish it had put me in my place because I did practically the same, instead of just blades that dug in
like your dulled needles, the pain felt in awareness never was. Always so obedient.
You held that deflated balloon filled with ****** over my head every moonless night in your mother's apartment.
I had to have known to beg was not love.
This was worship, utterly painful,
I recognize the role I have long feared as a martyr.
Your claim that I had made you so sad you couldn't feel anything became an incapacity for me though,
the sacrifices made in justifying broken things
function with the belief of no reparations are needed
and rather everyone should be as broken as you are.

You taught me the bruises from your crooked teeth landscaping my throat were entitlement.
Ownership.
These colors upon my flesh never meant you needed me.
You never wanted me, adamant you deserved me.
I was of convenience. This pain gave me something.
You were responsible for my rebirth, shut the door.
Another door opened that revealed who you are, rather another scar canvassing my body that I live with the intent of tattooing over.

To open my ribcage,
ink would spill around
***** feet and form
verses created inside this
sad sea of a mind, drowning
what surrounds. A firm
believer in common courtesy,
but not for myself as I never
write the line where I survive
maybe at least one
where I float above the surface &
remember to breathe.

He broke his neck thirty years ago
I break mine more with each
promise of keeping you in my life
but Ian Curtis is on my mind a lot,
grieving for souls I will never know.

Some of his songs are so sad,
like hearing the premature
snap of his bones

Cannot help but resent
how clever society is
to glamorize the unglamorous,
even I am aware
the flowers upon graves are not just for
aesthetics, but we are still always trying
to cover terrible tragedies
with beautiful things.

Am I just as guilty?

I cheat on you with him.
His spirit through my headphones,
hoped if I listen intently
the narrative changes.

purple marks on your neck
just that weekend you
taught me what a hickey was
and how they felt good

yours’ declare ownership,
not declarations of love.

You walk into art class,
purple painted across your throat.

If love could save Ian,
had I lived in the mid-seventies
he may very well have lived forever
and his throat painted by love,
rather than the bruises of a noose.

The letters I wrote you were in vain,
my mistake quoting those Smiths’
songs:
Morrissey is an *******
and so are you.

I still
am too scared to
wonder how far I am willing
to go
to reap the benefits of sorrow.

"New Dawn Fades"
tears into my heartstrings
feeling responsible in
the prevention of another
suicide

I grapple onto
what a savior complex was,
your dead father
the tracks on your arms made me cry
but I thought it was stupid.
It made me hate myself more
why could I not learn to undo
my drive to save anyone,
but myself

The phone call
where I broke up with
you and you
pretend to
overdose on the speaker

One of us had to grow up,
had to make it out alive
And I love you again,
every time Ian's ghost
sings Isolation.

And I leave you there,
sure, to end the album
after the final song.

I talk to myself
as the night arrives
in little caskets
slipping over
yellow rooftops.
Winter slithers
& rattles back
under the doors,
while spring slews in
on orange cloud.
I say your name
& a luster throbs
across the walls.
Late hours are
breach born,
full of bent bays
of lamp light,
I plead into the ceiling
until I fill
with sharp shapes
draped raw,
& my little speeches
perish in gloves of air.
Out of the window,
black ribbons streak
the riverbank face
to the moon etchings.
High tides blot me:
I still feel as I did
when I met you.
You're a heart shaker,
you wrest the lid
from the world,
your joy fills
my naked mouth.
But something
has gone wrong,
hasn't it?
Disordered,
melancholy -
you, too, see
the night-caskets,
don't you?  
Dublin facades
vanish beneath
rain scissor arms.
But it needn't be so -
come and lean on me.
I will remind you
that spring is come
with green armies
of blithe devotion,
trees flick
with leaf,
& you are loved.
I know you don't even
like me to call you babe,
not anymore, but
I'll live with that -
I'll tell the floorboards,
the starlings and magpies,
the unsealed horizontals
that report at dawn:
it will be alright,
it will be alright.