I want to start off by asking you to forgive me. I've never been good with apologies, only making lights in hospital flicker and leaving dead roses at your doorsteps as a reminder of all my withering mistakes. People spend a lot of time in hospitals when they feel guilty, people spend a lot of time with things that are dying - it makes them feel like they are paying for their sins. In the grand scheme of things, I get to watch you die for free when you inhale your burning, filtered death, and it is a beautiful thing. Admit me to the hospital, for I find that I used to have a heart but the love inside of it has turned malignant, it has eaten away my chest cavity and left nothing but a gaping wound that bleeds darkness, and your staple kisses can't even hold the wound together for long. Admit me to the hospital on the basis that love is blind and I had gouged my eyes out for you, willingly, for in my sight I saw the promised land and it looked a lot like you and I never knew paradise could be so cruel. Admit me to the hospital, and ask them to put me into an induced coma, and in my unconsciousness, tell me that you love me like you did when I was sleeping, because guilt makes people feel crazy things; guilt makes me angry that I am not a beautiful sunset, that you won't grab your camera and windbreaker and rush out to catch me before I disappear. I always loved you through the wrong vision, like staring out of stained glass windows in an empty chapel - you're supposed to be the one in the confession booths, yet here I am, etching my feelings for you like hieroglyphics into church walls and wherever else people will either abandon when they're happy or visit when they need a reason to not feel so guilty. Churches and hospitals are not so different , you and me are not so different - we have always been made for the guilty, and we are full of prayers from people who might not know that one man died for all to show his love indefinitely and I have been trying to hang from a tree ever since just so you would know for one moment. Again, forgive me, I have never been good with apologies.

Lover, I was never a creature of euphonious language, but, in the sincerest way possible, I want to trace the lines in your palms with my fingertips I could blindly transfer them onto paper like my native language; there is something that tells me that there are otherworldly creatures that breathe life into every speck of dust floating by your window in the early morning so they can be assured that every particle feels the blessing of seeing the loveliest of nonsense spilling from your lips in a low mutter; I have dreamt of a world where I am stringing harps with every word you said that I grabbed with my grimy hands and condensed into velvet strings and in this world I play you a melody and I do not tremble and you are immortal. However, I do not quarrel with this reality that is given to me, for I know that it is an honor to have been placed on this earth in the realm of your existence, to have the privelege to see the way the sun glows this new shade of warmth when it is bathing your shoulders — like a lover with kisses made of milky light, it kisses you into a divine sort of oblivion that I cannot help but envy and admire, I know we do not realize the true beauty of things until they are broken but I have haggled my soul to never see you crack, and God knows I would extinguish the flames behind my eyes so that they are reduced to low-burning coals, in the hopes that you and everything delicate that follows close behind will at least hover just beyond my grip, still not too close because I have always had trouble keeping a gentle grip on heavenly things and you are a piece of every form of divinity that I can bear to break down into fathomable thoughts; so, here I love you from worlds away — yes, from worlds away, I love you.

There is something about the way a feather hits the ground that sounds surprisingly similar to glass breaking and there are so many things I need to tell you but the words all dance in my head behind a mental block and they swirl with songs about broken boughs and fallen cradles and realizing this hits me harder than the day you realize that Ring Around The Rosie is about the Black Plague (I'm sorry for ever telling you that you were the childhood innocence I always wanted) but I suppose nothing can ever be as pure as a pair of turtle doves and I always imagined myself as a pigeon cooing at your feet while you sprinkle your affection like bread crumbs — always plentiful but always in your control — and I am always cooing, cooing for you, cooing even if you wrung my neck like your hands when you are nervous and you are always clipping my wings with those persuasions to keep me around and incapable of flying away or even imagining a home anywhere unless it is perched on either of your broad shoulders and I accept that; I have never been a songbird with anything lovely to croon about and while smoothing out my feathers I know why the caged birds sings and it's because all the birds that cry get their necks broken.

I'm going to love you like the floorboards do. I'm going to touch you like your bedroom walls never could; lay your forehead against me like the shower wall and try to recount every lie you ever told laying down. Your nails will hold me against the headboard in a dark act of crucifixion; I have been dying of your sins since before I understood that they were not the kinds that I should love, and perhaps this is not the kind of love that ends well on glossy pages but it is the only love I know. I was a nearly dead stray on your doorstep and you fed me pretty words from your hands like you knew how to take care of things that had no home (despite having never had one of your own). You know too well how your name sounds when your hand is on my knee, you know too well how your name sounds when you are coaxing the life out of me, as though my trachea were the back door of your apartment, and you know how deadly you are with a look on your face that burns like the candles in a chapel but never melts - I sit vigil over your dead body but your ghost is always touching me, you are always bringing out the worst in me and stretching it out like sheets over a ****** mattress and I cannot take care of myself and I am incapable of breathing until you are watching me.

It should be noted that girls don't always come from Venus, that some boys might be a little deader than they were before they claimed you took their breath away. Some girls have barbed wire around their hearts, and others have white flags. Some boys have touched more cigarettes than thighs, more blades in the bathroom sink than the ones in her shoulders. The city might whisper the name of one boy and tremble at the thought of another; a girl have a hit list with only one name on it — her own. Some boys will **** just to say they lost their virginity and some boys will spend the rest of their lives making love as though they could gain it back; some girls have lost their tears and sweat in the upholstery of the same car that might belong to one of these boys — and some of those same boys are sweaty handprints on the backseat windows while others are fingerprints on your throat (no matter how you look at it, he will always leave his mark, won't he?)
  It should be noted that some girls will miss you like Hiroshima playgrounds miss the laughter of young children, but others will miss you like an 11:30 flight at 11:31, and I bet you never knew that some boys will never tell you that they miss their father just as much as some girls calling everyone else Daddy except for the one they truly need; you'd never believe me if I said that some girls look at the night sky where they used to see their reelection in the stars, but now only see another broken mirror.
  It should be noted, that not all boys are from Mars.