A love like pomegranate seeds — I am condemned to a mortal marriage with Death, waiting for his hands to touch me in the winter; I am stuck inside an autumnal equinox, waiting for the spring. My mind is a brothel — filthy and thoughts floating in and out but not looking for any sort of commitment. But you say that my brain is efflorescent and something lovelier than I would believe. There are cities in the palms of my hands, once teeming with life like the Great Barrier Reef, but now moan the silent sounds of desolation within a Chernobyl wasteland; but you are roaming the ashes atop my fingertips like a lost child trying to unearth the memories of her mother beneath the rubble of a shaken faith, despite knowing she was lost forever in the wake of brutal destruction, kicking me left and right as though I were the collapsed mountain of infrastructure in the wake of early September, 2001. I say all this to confirm that I do miss your voice and its fluidity on the phone — I miss your voice even though I know you'll hang up, and I wish I felt that way about living. I only want you to hold my sticky heart like melted candy.  I want you to stop sighing and slumping in your chair like the names of every Holocaust victim is engraved on your eyelids. I want you to smile like an innocent child, for once.

I shook hands with the monster under my bed tonight, correction: I dragged the monster out by his ankles and I introduced myself and I shook his hand. It was cold, and it felt like you. It was cold, and I wanted to hold it forever, I really did. Maybe it would make up for lost time and all those chances I never took with your fingertips when I had the opportunity.  The truth is, I didn't meet a monster. I met a childhood fear and some dust bunnies and a little bit of my own self; the truth is, monsters don't live under your bed because they lay beside you, under your sheets, at times on top of you, maybe they are spilling lies in your mouth and whispering secrets to your teeth, maybe monsters live in your mirrors, calling you names, maybe monsters touch you in your sleep, maybe monsters have big hands that feel like home but then you remember you're a runaway.

Love is blind but please, watch my back - I can think of no death worse than a demise brought upon myself from being too lost in your eyes. I was starving and trembling in your wake as though you'd locked me in your basement (and I would've fettered myself to your baseboards if you told me to); how could I not get chills the size of mountains on my spine when the wind was blowing your rusty ribs like wrought iron gates? I spent many a night wondering if your heart could weather the storm. I spent even more time listening to the ticking of my clock until it started to sound like you, and I bet no one told you that my heart will simply beat like a metronome on your time until the conductor waves his baton. On some Wednesdays, records will skip and mock me like you do. On this day, there will be cataclysms, and they will look just like you.

I want you hold me more like bible and less like a grudge, but you just want to mumble proverbs to my neck while I touch you like a psalm, both of our breaths lost in senseless revelations. I have been keeping to much track of how many times you try to break me into lines so that maybe I will look more like poetry and less like a eulogy; you're only here because you have time on your hands, but darling, I have blood on mine and I'm sorry that I have had more than a few thoughts of what you might look like covered in red. Dying never should be ******, but you told me I look killer in this dress, and I know you only said it because you see it's strapless and you're so used to seeing me wear my heart on my sleeve. It won't matter once I'm dead, or even once we touch, but all I know is that this bed feels cold as hell and you're right here beside me and that's a paradoxical statement but so are you and none of that is even close to fair.

I have been trying to think of ways to say 'I love you' on paper
without writing outside the lines.
There is much more to the way the blinds paint sunlight on your body
than beat up notebooks and chewed up pencils.
I make a lot of mistakes,
the kind that rubber only smears but doesn't erase.
I didn't mean to crumple your delicate skin like paper.
I know that paper comes from trees,
yet all the poems that make me think of you do nothing
to help me breathe, and your touch only proves
that my breath is easier to take away than you'd like to believe.
Forgive me for being comprised almost entirely of errors and mistakes and strikethroughs with red pens,
While you are so clean and refined.
I think of you in cursive.
Take my trembling wrists in your strong fingers
and guide me with a steady and patient hand.
Teach me to love you in bold print and I will underline it three times,
and again,
and again,
and again.
In my head, you are a million brainstorms thrown into waste buckets,
and if for some strange reason Helvetica is the only way to make you almost understand my thoughts,
then I am typing furiously and waiting for you to see them all.
All I ever wanted was to fill the doubles spaces between your fingers with my own,
even though sometimes you wish you could
backspace the words you didn't mean to say to me
while I pretend I don't remember them.
I have been trying to think of ways to say 'I love you' on paper
without writing outside the lines.
Then I ripped up the paper, scribbled it on a napkin,
and wiped the blood off my face with it instead.

Maybe I am a crybaby. Maybe I am the person that feels twice as hard because she has a father that doesn't feel anything and maybe I love too much because I watched 2 parents that didn't know how to do it but they pretended because l talked to myself since I was too young to understand why the sky is blue and maybe the things I said scared them. Maybe I made up friends, not for the sake of having some, but for the sake of knowing that at least they understand and at least they won't judge me because I scratched my legs until I bled and they don't know that I'm making up all these happy stories of vacations I've never been on so I don't feel so sad in school while everyone talks about what they did over the summer because all mom and dad ever did was scream at each other run from their problems while I drew in my room. Maybe I grew out of my imaginary friends because I'm not even worth their imaginary time and their imaginary presence the imaginary way they pretended to care. Maybe I called my dad even though I know what he did because I still loved him because he's still my ******* dad and he loved his son and he wouldn't tell him that it's wrong to break baby birds' necks and it's wrong to sneak into your sister's room and hurt her. Maybe he hasn't picked up on the fact that life is a big cycle, but you can't let your child hurt because your father let you hurt and his father let him hurt. Maybe I left long voicemails talking about one day being able to see him without a supervisor because I hated the way she wrote everything I said down, including the time I cried because he wouldn't stop prying me about if my mother would let us go out of state together. Maybe I don't need razors and cigarettes because my body isn't even worth the pain at this point. Or, maybe I'm just a coward who can't face death or who doesn't want to hurt more than she already does. Maybe I love too many sick people. Maybe I love too many normal people. Maybe everyone's sick and I just don't realize it yet. Maybe I self-loathe too often, maybe I shouldn't have said those things to people I thought gave a ****,; maybe it's a dream and I'll wake up and be five again. Maybe I don't want to be five again because being five was more hell than being alive. Maybe we wish some people we love were dead because it's too painful to know that they are somewhere loving some stranger when they couldn't ******* call their own child back. But I don't know. I don't know a thing. Not a **** thing. Maybe my ghosts sing because they've got nothing ******* better to do, because their fists just slide through every wall they try to punch. Maybe the dead don't rise because there's something about this life that makes Hades look like paradise I don't know. I don't know a **** thing. Maybe the wolf is howling at what the moon took from him. Maybe the stars are self-conscious and don't like to be stared at. Maybe we're always alone. Maybe we're always ******* alone. But I don't know. I do not know a **** thing.

Darling, I'm afraid I've broken the coffee maker again.
Darling, I'm afraid that all the orange bottles are empty again.
Darling, I'm afraid that sometimes walls remind me
of either the ones you threw me against or the ones I put up around my heart
so that no one can love me ever again.

Darling, I'm afraid that I don't see stars in the sky anymore,
just a lot of eyes staring down at me,
scrutinizing me like interstellar councilmen,
knowing about every disgusting thing that I have done
when I thought it was just me and you and the peeling wallpaper.

Darling, I'm afraid that I am woven around your ribcage
like the beads of a rosary
are wrapped around the fingers of a sinner who has sold their soul
to the devil for forgiveness from God
one too many times.

Darling, I'm afraid I have to pause to talk about your fingers.
I am not wrapped around just one, but all of them.
I was hoping to bind you like a book so I could read you a little better,
but I'm afraid I've just entangled myself in a giant mess
and I'm afraid that you're a little too amused by my demise.

Darling, I'm afraid that guns shoot and so do stars,
I'm afraid that wishbones break and so do bones,
and I'm afraid that feathers float and so do bodies.
Darling, I'm afraid that I'm sorry that I cannot fix you,
because I don't think I can even fix myself.

Darling, I'm afraid I'm just
afraid.

- b.b.