If you want to have ***, that's okay, nobody would blame you
Most sculptures are **** bodies, you told me *** is art.
If you want to **** yourself, I won't try to kiss it out of you,
Like a white guy. I'm not white and you don't like to kiss.
If you hurt yourself on purpose, I swear I won't ask.
If you hate yourself, I won't tell you I hate myself too. If you hurt yourself
on purpose, I won't make you feel like you have to tell me it was an
accident. If you want to be loved in the worst way, I won't hate the girl
that's willing to do it. Because that makes me a *****
and who wants to talk to a *****? If you want to give head tonight,
I won't call you. Sometimes scars look like stretch marks in the dark.
If you rail any drugs, try not to
wander in the streets. And don't cry if you cross any streets,
because i know your friends are dying and they don't seem to care,
but I know you do. If you want to write some bad poetry, I won't say,
"That's bad." That's because I'll think it's good and that's because,
I'm in love with you. I don't know what love is, by the way.
If you want someone to **** you, don't ask anybody pretty.
Ask me. I'm ugly and I'll say no. I never walked a mile in your shoes,
but I keep walking up and down the stairs,
like I can feel you creaking.

We write about two AM because it is simplicity and we are underexposed. Overtime, simplicity becomes complex and subjective and harder to define. Soon you associate two AM with her hair holding on desperately to her shoulder blades, but at that point it doesn't matter what time it is because all your brain understands is her mouth and how badly you want to kiss it. Everything is clinging to something: hair to skin, sheets to mattress, mouth to teeth; but the real fear lies in what will end up letting go and this is why we are born with out fists clenched, because from the moment we are living, every insecurity spills like air out of a bag you thought was vacuum sealed. See, life is full of complexities and we can't seem to find permanent serenity, but, in the midst of it all, there are small things that resonate within us and soon we collapse into a string of cliches and we fight not to drown within them, collectively babbling and trying to make sense of the concept of never letting go.

When you laid in my bed, you were a landscape painting, and I had filthy hands. When you sat, ******* and upright at my kitchen table, you were a storm and I had nothing solid to hold onto. Everything else in between is a blur, and I am grabbing whatever I can from the Styx swirling around my synapses. In the end I am holding onto what feels like broken glass and I am trying to describe this in a way that will lure you back under my floorboards until you seep through and catch me by surprise like a flash flood. Everything about you stings like saltwater and everything about me bends for you like light and I am so covered in wounds and you are so covered in shadows. When you lay in my bed and sigh like God; when you peel an orange in a way that makes my heart feel all your tearing and pulling, I can stutter for up to six hundred ninety one thousand two hundred seconds. Eight days pass and my lips slowly learn to speak again.

It's been raining for months and I can't turn the faucet off – which reminds me: the sea is yours if you want it, and you don't have to be afraid of a little rainwater anymore. When you walk to your car with your shoes off and most of your sanity folded in your jeans, when your feet slap against puddles and you are remembering that you left your jacket on the doorknob, don't ever wonder if I will awaken suddenly, crying because you never stayed long enough for me to write that song to the beat of your hesitant pulse. Your car, evidently can take you farther than my hands can, but no road leading to your house and no street lamp mocking you silently knows that I hang pearls on the threads of your sanity and my stairs groan loudest when you are trying to leave quietly. If you turn around now – if you run back and tell me that you want to be sky to me and nothing else, then I will let you, as long as you promise to bleed the next eighty thousand sunrises; I will stop mentioning you to forests and looking for you in satellites and in smoldering coals, if you promise to murmur my name when the horizon is stretching and prostrating itself across the late evening. I will tell you where the sun goes when the Atlantic swallows her whole, if you tell me about the streams of cirrus clouds backing up your bloodstream. And I never ask you to search for the wildfires under my shirt again, if you give me all of the starlight under yours.

I once said I was on cloud nine, but who's counting, anyways? I would, but, you see, I have too many things to tell you at once, more than I can count one one or two or six thousand hands - even still, the sun in your hair is doing a pretty good job of saying the words that they haven't made up for you yet. In my mind, the world would be happier it they'd stop looking for heaven in the sky because the universe that exists where my fingertips stop and your skin starts is not clothed in all white and there are no pearly gates but in this small fraction of a moment, nobody is dying. In some way, something taught us to tilt our heads back and stare at the starry expanse of the celestial universe above us as though we were looking for the answers to every thing we've ever been to afraid to ask but, in my peripheral vision, something about you glittered and my neck was tired from staring and calling out to whatever existed beyond our world and getting a divine busy tone, it was nice to see something beautiful in these human realms, for once. So if there is room to buid even the smallest shelter in the spaces between the small spaces in your teeth, I promise to construct one out of gentle words; if there was a scripture to make the veins under your skin sing praises a little louder, then I would write and rewrite the Bible until my hands bled. Just let me be the reason you are hungry but do not starve, let me show you the way that a body can unfold without crumpling first; I will trace a pattern onto your skin without so much as a single sound, but still, it could, perhaps, be something close to music.

Pull your sleeve over your fist. Clean your window. The moon is smirking, hanging like a hangnail off of the fingers of the night, about to teeter off the edge of the atmosphere trying to get a good glimpse of you - a better one. Let your hair fall down, and do not be afraid. Stars stare in a twinkling trance until the cruel curtain of the blue summer sky veils them from your sleeping face like a bride from the aisle, and from outer space you are a fuzzy silhouette until the sun sleepily sets, rolls off the sky's tongue like an alliteration from God himself; we have found that the atmosphere's magnetic field will put on a celestial show, but something about the way you sigh in your sleep keeps the dawn peeking over the horizon like a rosy-cheeked child over the tops of trees. The fog has dissipated like cigarette smoke - it's a beautiful night to be the full moon. Stretch your sinewy body - let your bones crack ever so carelessly. Allow the moonlight to cling to your skin like my arms never can, and bring yourself to keep your form cradled by the curtains of a silky breeze as you gaze at the sky as though it wants to tell you something. On this evening, midnight is going to love you better than I ever could. On this night I cannot be the moonlight, on many nights I can only dream. But at least you are immortal when the moon abandons the tugging of the tides to gently tug at your hair until mist and cicada songs are woven throughout, until milky beacons of starlight on your cheeks transform into my very own fingertips.

Pearl white
the color of four walls in an empty hospital room
or the color of your teeth when you are smiling
at anyone who isn't me; I think you know what I want to see
before I let myself go under.
Pearl white - the color of slate I could scrub
until my knuckles bled but never quite clean - you know,
white is the color of an innocence
I'll never know, like a blank open document
before it is corrupted by words, a blank sheet of paper
before I smash my skull open like a glass jar
and let the ink drop and stick like preserves;
I've never been that smart of a guy and every big word
I ever said to you was probably forced.
Pearl white - your bones if you'd ever let me see them,
but oh no, never touch - you know,
pearl white isn't made for hands like these, these hands are sticky
with baggage and defilement and I fell in love
with the way your body melted into a white couch
but I never said anything, nothing, no way, no how
all the fears in my throat are blood red and I have always been afraid
of staining beautiful things. Pearl white -
I can stare at a full moon like an empty notebook for hours
and nothing may come out, but when I look at the whites of your pearl eyes,
I start to remember the phrase about the world being my oyster
and once I upon a time I realized I have such tiny hands
and I was scared to hold something so intimidating and large,
but now you stand here and suddenly I can hold the universe in my palms.
I would dress you in all white - white is the color of a ghost hiding beneath a bed sheet,
white is the color of wedding dresses and maybe if you stand in a graveyard
you might hear church bells, but, then again, you could just
press your ear to my chest instead.
Pearl white - the color of four walls in an empty hospital room
or the color of your teeth when you are smiling
at anyone who isn't me; I think you know what I want to see
before I let myself go under.