Another **** conversation
beneath a tangerine moon
Tonight is one segment - not enough to share
You tell me I’m selfish
and you are yelling
even though I told you that grapefruit
can make your medication not work;
And it’s unnerving peeling clementines with you
Can you de-flesh me too, with your bare hands?
Are you mad at me?
No, You say,
it’s just not the right time
I told you I would give you the moon
But for now these oranges will have to do

But come back when the world is ripe
Then I’ll peel and split it with you.

So today you'll be in love this girl from the internet and tomorrow you be in love with that girl from the internet and today your mother will ask you to look up from your phone for two seconds and tomorrow you will be ******* over a girl that you can't that you can't look in the eye because her eyes are miles and away and they're always watching you with disinterest, until you lose interest; some Catholic girl told me that long distance relationships make it easy to fall I to son and I got to understanding why God stays so far away. I know how to ruin myself with one hand, I know how to tear you apart with two. I know how stop taking care of myself until I'm overgrown with weeds just to watch you grow; some idiot said you don't forget how to ride a bike so I got lazy and stopped using one and some idiot said you don't forget your first love and I did the same thing. I saw the train coming and I laid you down on the tracks like I cared, and I did but I just don't know how and that's how the deal, no one knows how to do anything, hardly anyone knows how to derail trains.
And today I'll fail my test becase I didn't study, tomorrow I'll remember that a year ago you said my name for the first time; today I'll sit on my hands until they tingle just to make sure that I'm alive; we'll delve into the meanings of 'love' and 'lust', but in the end they'll both still feel the same, I'll wonder if you track dirt into your house with your boots or if you just track hurt, you'll always keep me right where you can see you but never where I can hold you. We'll speak well about each other and keep our dark secrets tucked into the waistbands of our skirts like crisp white shirts. I can't understand why anyone would want to live in the first world, where all we do is keep things we love in dusty boxes and sit in traffic and hurt the people we love and write about it.
And then we'll leave the internet and grow up and be gray and our tweets will die out like people do and then we won't think about it much. We won't think about it much.

Put your mouth into mine and hold me like a tomb does. We've shared our bodies and our badness to the point of decay, we might as well keep washing our hands with each other's filth.
On the one night I slept for more than four hours, I dreamt that you had derailed a train with your your bare hand
it crashed into my front door and ran into my bedroom to see me, it pulled me atop it and the train was you
now i need you to cut up your passport and give it to the wind, I need you to set your past on fire and return to the ground with me, to consume with the only fire that will out mine out.
The fine line between you holding me and you holding me hostage is  wearing so thin that I can hardly see it, wearing, like the clothes I had on, the clothes I tore off in hopes of finding you somewhere beneath them, like a stupid girl does, like a stupid girl does, like a stupid girl does
I remember when you told me that I'd never see the good side of you,
right after you told me how easy it is for me to see the truth. And those words tasted nice , they tasted like power
You put dominance into the hands of submissive like an orphaned child into the hands of a widow, and you watched her run with it
I make a bet with myself that I can abandon you for more than a little while
I made a bet last September that I would hate you this September, but you keep slipping
into the arousal of the hatred you provoke in me and I keep saying your name into a hole in the ground like a song into a microphone. So listen. So listen. So listen.
A language is just the way the tongue falls in love with the body
I miss the days when I ached for you to put yours to mine.

Walking in a circle is, in the fondest sense, going absolutely nowhere, even though it feels better than walking completely backwards. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but I have never even been face to face with you and mine grows weaker and weaker with the length of time between the moments I get to touch you. The strange thing is that, prior to meeting you, I have a hard time describing what it was I was even doing - the storms you have hurled into my quiet life is all I know now, and I never realized just how flimsy my own infrastructure was. I have seeped into the walls you throw dishes in and the floors you roll around on, and I feel everything your fists do equally, if not more. Who knows my body better than you? The places I dip and divide and ***** and bend; who has held me down with nothing but words and sweaty silence that lay thick enough for us to cut with butcher knives? My stomach is trained to clench is desperation when your name is mentioned and I am nervous around anyone who shares with you; a picture is worth a thousand words, but your name is worth one million, and you've never spoken mine aloud but I have murmured yours, like a mantra, repeatedly, groaning in the way wounded animals do and trembling with that same fear. I can't count on my fingers how many nights I traded sleep for a reason to talk to you, and all too well do I know how many lifetimes are crammed into the seconds before an anticipated phone call. People might wonder how I even survive when you aren't around, but how many ways can a dog entertain himself when the master is away? Oftentimes, in a state of unwarranted panic, I claw at my clothes as though you are lurking underneath, and only rarely are you there, metaphysically. I am not the only person the rain falls on; I understand that there are plenty of others who are lulled by the charm of someone who knows nature of a human being in the way that otherworldly creatures might, but in this instance I know that everyone is haunted in their own exclusive way, and you are always flickering in the periphery of my blurry vision when my bedroom lights are out.

you are not twenty seven years old. you are twenty seven sorrows, twenty seven apologies, twenty seven broken pencils in a coffee mug. you used to keep memories like fireflies in jars, but now, you harvest them like organs, and you can't shake them to make you glow. i stuck a bird in where my heart should be but my pulse still sounds like a dial tone. the way a ticking clock drives a person insane is the way everything falls in love with you. the way everything falls in love with you is the way that delicate things break, and everything is delicate in the presence of a hurricane. you know how to be a storm, but no one loved you enough to show you how be a home, and the foundation you are built on is a broken as our mind - you are held together by tape and tiny hands , you are bound together by apologies and if anyone forgave you, you would simply fall apart. we must fold ourselves seventy seven times and tuck ourselves into the arms of the people we love, in hopes they never learn to read our language, and you are words written in a way that leaves everyone hanging onto each one by the skin of their teeth, even if they don't understand. I hope it's fine if i still try. if you are brave enough to touch the world, you will find that it is constantly on fire, and you never have to ask for a light.
you are not twenty seven years old, you are twenty seven wet matches, twenty seven empty rooms to scream in, twenty seven breakdowns in the bathroom. sometimes you are the sun and you can rise, but you are a deadly comedown (in any event, you are always glowing). I can hear you folding and unfolding like an origami flower, my hands know where you bend even though i have never touched you. i have seen the fear that drips through the cracks in your tough exterior, and i pried apart my own innocence to slip my way inside.  
  how many times do you groan before you finally heave and let the weight **** you? you know, contrary to what is generally believed, love knows bounds very well. it knows them and, it plunges over them, spills and overcomes you and foams around your feet before dragging you out to open see and mocks your cries for help until you finally stop thrashing and succumb to the sick trick that you have fallen for. i used to think love was a steady push and pull, but then i love you; when play tug of war with a ghost, you always end up with enough rope on your side to make a noose out of. i wanted to turn you on, not disgustingly, but in the way that i stumble in the dark, groping the wall for a switch. all of my nerves were hair triggers when you opened your mouth, now they are loud sirens and they scream when you are gone. a barely present as you would like to paint yourself out to be, i have felt you in places that are four dimensional, in the depths of my own murky consciousness that not even i know how to reach. the way a storm busts down a wooden door is the way that you enter a room,  the way you enter me. you know how to bend the light and you know how to break it, too. allow me to envelop myself in you like words in brackets, but never let me speak aloud. how many times can someone caress your jaw until it feels like you've been clocked repeatedly, and how many times can you fall in love with same person before you bust your mouth completely on their shoulder?
even after you have dragged me through this fire and made me bite all of the dust and all of the concrete beneath it, i have still loved you with a mouthful of broken teeth. now i am here to spit them out into your hands and make enough room in my throat to cough up my stifled pride.

There is sea salt all over my hands, and I know I'm not the ocean.
So let's drink tea out of mason jars,
with cold porcelain shards instead of ice,
and let's cut our mouths on every argument we've ever had.
I hope you don't mind if I make a home out of you,
and I'm sorry if my spirit doesn't fit so well inside of yours, you see
I have been carrying dead weight with me like a terminated pregnancy,
and mourning the emptiness inside of me like a miscarriage.
Now it seems like I'm only giving birth
to the sorrow that my heart cannot hold.
Now I'm starting my mid-life crisis early, stating over, starting with you.
I'm writing my past into the sand, waiting for the tide to clean my slate.
So just wait a little but while I hold my breath hostage,
and I will wait for a ransom to come,
and I will pray that it doesn't come barreling down my door, looking like you.

People don't love the way they used to. My mom taught me that. You taught me everything else. We, in a state of mock individuality, look for the good part of ourselves in others so we have a good reason to love them better than we hate ourselves, because we are too afraid to admit that we aren't terrible things. So I keep checking my yard to see if you had been asleep when you crashed into my lawn (but that is never the case). And it's not even because I'm looking for the good parts of myself in you, it's because I'm just looking for someone who doesn't care that there is no good part of myself to look for. No matter where I sit, my feet always dangle off the ground. And that's what life is like : an infinite state of dangling; a throne of questions, and we never quite touch the ground.
Summer doesn't feel like freedom when you've spent the whole winter in love. Buried beneath the crushing weight of my own frozen apologies and punching my feelings into deaf ears like the clock on a workday, I keep twirling in circles, trying to check the serial number on the back of my neck in vain. I am falling, but not into you and so it is more of a fast crash in slow motion that nobody can feel but me. I'm tired of spinning. I'm tired of digging for reasons like a stick in the ground. I know I'm not a dog, but I never learn. Oh my God, I never learn. And neither do you.

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.

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.

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.

I love you. All of you. Including your flaws. Maybe especially them. It is to the point where I wonder if I'd love you at all if you were perfect. I love you for everything that you aren't, for every hiccup in your genetic makeup, every nick on your face, everything that they make gels and scrubs to get rid of. For every time you fell short of the mark, every time you almost did but didn't. I love you for all the things you could never love about yourself, all the skeletons in your closet, all the things you'd rather no one ever know enough about to love. And you are completely ignorant to that fact, and perhaps that is another flaw that has me falling more and more in love with you.

I want to be the abandoned house you snuck into every other night
because there was nowhere else to go.
Slam my trembling frame against the wall like an old vase
and smile as every ***** inside me crumbles like books off their shelf in the midst
of an earthquake caused from the faults inside your knuckles
and underneath your tongue.
I want to be every bad habit that you can't break. When there are no more walls to punch, you can leave holes in my bones instead.
When there's a pit in your stomach that you never can fill,
you can shove me in your mouth with both hands and eat fast
and feel me run down your chin.
You can savor the nausea from overindulgence
and grab the crumbs from off the floor.
You can tip me over and lick me up.
When you can't bite your nails anymore, my throat is welcoming your teeth.
Don't be afraid because this is your last lack of cigarettes;
You can always light me up instead, my love.
I can assure you my screams are more addicting
than what any nicotine can give you.
And me? I'm just addicted to the way 'good girl' rolls of your lips.
I'm addicted to being the reason you can't stop, won't stop, don't stop.
I want to be the response to your calls of desperation.
Listen closely to my hips and answer every question they could ever have with your tongue. Tell my neck things that you could never confess to any preacher,
and beg for forgiveness to my thighs until they've giving every ounce of their blessing
to your neck.
Don't worry about collapsing
I will catch all of you and swallow you whole.
Tell me I moan like an angel, even though I feel like sin.
I love the way my ribs creak when I hear you say my name.

Darling, I am not here to write about your eyes and the stars in them. I tried to count too many times and I got too lost in the dreams imbedded in your corneas. I'm not here to talk about how the sun only rises because you give it a reason to, because it still sets every evening so it doesn't have to hear your steady breathing while you sleep. I'm here to tell you about how you have words that cut me like a saw cuts bone and how my ribs are held together with cheap twine and my spine is duct taped together. Here to say that you make my heart race at a pace that my body cannot keep up with. I didn't come to tell you that the tides are kissing the shore every time you laugh, because that's not what your laugh is like. No, if the rusting of iron made a sound, it would be your laugh. There are no flowers woven in your hair - instead, there are hornets and their nests lay settled in your throat and your intention is to sting me every time you open your mouth to say something that isn't my name. This isn't about poetry I've read about the moon and the sun and the cosmic loneliness of every star despite the presence trillions of them in the same sky. This is about how some stars find your presence so alluring that they begin to tumble from the sky and this is what we wish upon. This is about bruised lips mumbling words carved into coffee tables and ****** fingers tracing the rim of your favorite coffee cup. This isn't about love. This is about you.

CARNATION: Every frill in her dress is another piece of your heart broken. She withers in the winter but heaven forbid you see her at her loveliest in the spring.

VIOLET: Her voice sounds like steel cutting through velvet. You squeeze her tightly until she blooms in petals of blue and purple.

DAFFODIL: She's a field to run across but be careful that doesn't take you by surprise and lull you into daydreaming for the next 200 years.

SWEET PEA: By the time you lean close to her an inhale her scent, the sky will have already begun falling; she will have already transformed into vapor and taken refuge in your lungs.

LILY OF THE VALLEY: You'd expect to see her floating around in twos and threes, but she'd rather be hidden behind tangles of ivy, where you'd never find her.

ROSE: Be careful that when your hands are grazing her hips that you don't cut yourself because a woman hides her most important weapons under a layer of secrets and maybe there's more to the waistband of her skirt than you'd like to believe.

WATER LILY: A siren of the sea, she is lilting, singing a sad song and hypnotizing you, but you don't know any better and you want to see if she floats in your hands like she does in the water.

POPPY: Kiss her softly and when she collapses into pieces at your feet, scatter her in your bathwater and pull the drain plug and forget about her forget about her forget about her forget

MORNING GLORY: She stretches in the morning and sunlight rushes to touch her and the stripes of rays on her skin make you remember all the reasons why you woke up everyday for a reason other than habit.

MARIGOLD: Beware of the girl who covers her mouth when she smiles. Sometimes, it's because she doesn't want you to see that her heart is in her throat, but other times she's just trying to hide the fangs.

CHRYSANTHEMUM: Her clothes fall like petals in the depths of secrecy, but if you plucked them off the ground one by one, you'd still never know whether she loves you or loves you not.

NARCISSUS: You only love her because you see your reflection in her eyes and all she ever wanted to do was drown you gently.

I was praying that there was more to time than numbers on a clock. I was hoping that throwing coins into a well was not all that fate left us to tamper with and that maybe I could throw them into your mouth instead. How you've managed to shackle my feet with words alone, smooth as silk bindings, I will never understand. But those words are leaving red marks on my bones and I'm beginning to have the urge to gnaw at them. I have heard the clocks tick in disapproval at the hours we spend staring at the walls instead of at each other, and the sound of your foot bouncing against the floor is all to similar to the sounds of my fist tapping the wall, contemplating if it's worth putting a whole in it, around the size of the hole you put in my heart. The numbers on the clock is all that we have, so we have to make it count, so let's stop counting down the minutes until we're over and start counting down the seconds until we begin.

b.b.

Sometimes I think to myself that maybe you are actually rain and you are evaporating in the heat of the moment, when I need you the most. Those lips have eased cool words from your tongue like runoff, and your mouth has carelessly dropped beaded kisses onto my throat like a foggy window pane, and you can see through me just as easily.  And after you've stormed into my room and I've felt the thunder of your fingers shaking me to the core, you still linger on me like the smell after the first spring showers. And thoughts of you precipitate in the form of acid rain, inside my head like the ***** city downpours and my brain is just a brand new Corvet left in the parking lot. You have redeemed me, refreshed me, corroded me. I can see the lightning in your eyes every time your hands are hovering over me, and now all I can do is count the seconds until I hear the thunder.

Are you sleeping well these days? I hope so because I don't sleep anymore. There is so much to think about now; there is no time to sleep anymore, because my brain has to handle you. I wish your belt was my fingers, underneath the loops of your jeans, pulling you towards me. That tie doesn't belong around your neck; it belongs around mine. Are you sleeping at all these days? I never did. I wake up when I think you might be standing by the wall, and you never are. Maybe I will open the door and find you on your knees, coughing up blood and apologies. Do not fidget every time you remember your hand doesn't have another to hold, because then it will become a habit and you will hate me. Do not bite your nails or look at ledges you have thought about jumping. They will become habits and you will hate me. Do not form habits for your fingers to develop since they have no throats to grab. You will hate me. I never want you to hate me, not in the way that you will. The time is 3:06 AM and I hope you still love me the way I want you to.

Please stop making me love you. And while you're at it, please stop making me like you. It's hard enough to count sheep without seeing you like a wolf, disguised as innocent but ready to skin me alive when I get close.
Now and then, I scratch at the paint on the wall by my bed and observe how easily it flakes off, and I wondered if I had spent anymore time scratching your back would your skin finally start to peel so that I could see the darkness beneath it.
Now and again I savor the feeling of my stomach bottoming out when I lose my footing while stumbling down the stairs in a halfway alternate reality that starts and ends with strands of your hair in my mouth and in between my fingers. Give me the strength to love you and I will give you my unloved dog-like devotion.
I've played my cards and I've got no more hands, but I don't mind you shuffling your deck and using my back as a poker table. Come over and talk to me sometime, and you can break my neck and talk about the weather and **** time by killing me. The stars are beginning to lose their shape and soon the sun will push them all aside and I cannot wait. I never was afraid of the dark, but I'm terrified of you.

The other day I thought about you, and by that I mean that I wasn't thinking much at all. I stare at the ceiling and count the cracks in it and fall asleep only to wake up to the sound of some imaginary rain hitting the roof once. I don't remember leaving my door cracked, but the wind pushed it wide open again. I imagine (I hope) I will find your arm behind the door, but for now it's just another ghost leaning on the door jamb. Your name is the first thing that comes up when I flip on every light in my house, trying to find the source of the noises I swear you're making, and your name is the last thing I can see before the bulbs go out. I'm tracing holes in the wall - holes I've created - and imagine those holes are on you and I am tracing their edges. I have to trace something these days, or the walls will fall from my knuckles fighting them too much, so I take a black pen and trace letters from my imagination and write these things down on paper, bearing down so hard that they begin to carve into the desk, so that not even the wood can forget about you.

Your eyes are the color of chocolate bars. I want to see if your lids really peel like candy wrappers, but you won't let me touch you. So I fidget with my hands and think that perhaps the smell of peppermint on your breath runs all the way down your throat and into the pit of your stomach. And if I reach the pit of your stomach, I'd probably find butterflies, but they're all dead. Your body is poisonous, after all. I'm very well aware of this fact. But if clenching my stomach in crippling pain is going to keep you flowing through my bloodstream like cheap ******, then I will drink you in twice as fast. You are a better way to die than anything I can think of off the top of my head. Undress, slowly, and in the fraction of a blind moment when you can't see me as you're taking off your shirt, imagine that I am already dead. And, when my dress pools around my feet like rainwater, take satisfaction in knowing my autopsy report will place my cause of death as your silhouette in this poorly lit room. Send me to the grave covered in love bites and lay me on the bed like you're trying to lay me inside a coffin. Bury me under your weight, our bodies resting in anything but peace.

I want you to come. I don't mean this in some sort of lustful way (although I feel some sort of passion) , but I mean in want you to come as in here. Here. You were here at some point in time, but your body was here and your mind was floating off into the ignite regions of space, regions I could only dream about, almost the way I dreamt about the day you'd stop looking through me as though I were some sort of ghost. Funny how you treat me like a ghost, but I feel so human when I think about my feelings for you and everything in respects to you. Over 70% of your body is water, but the rain doesn't feel as good as your hands falling onto my skin. Your hands tug on my shirt the same way you tug on my mind when my shirt is unbothered, but there is more to love than tugging, darling. And there is more to tugging then just my teeth on your bottom lip. There is more to anything if you dig deep enough, so I try to remember to dig deeper scratches into your back and hope that I might find my way to your heart. It's hard though, because I haven't even felt your ribcage yet.

I must have had a 'perishable' sticker on my heart when you came along. We are all just dates to best be used by, or, at least, that's what I told myself while you consumed me. I love the way you consume me, in the physical sense that your very presence engulfs my own in a way that makes me nothing more than a piece of meat grinding between your jaws. My insignificance is so significant to you that you tell me about it often, and I never hear the end of of it. I never want to hear the end of it because I think I love you but I only think I do because I never watched my parents love at all, so I can only assume. I want to break lines and talk about you in a cliche way, but you are too much of a run-on sentence for that and the line breaks make me think of my spine under your hands and I can't go back to that. The walls are calling again but this time, I can't bring myself to answer.

Treat me like your favorite sweater. Give me a use and make me stick to it. I know you only want me during certain periods of time, but maybe the rare last minute occasion will come and you'll use me. Put holes in me and pull my threads. I'll go with everything, blend in, keep you warm, make you feel safe. Spill hot coffee on me and throw me in the hamper. Toss me under the bed, but frantically look for me when the occasion comes and you need me because there isn't anybody else. Bury your face into me and breathe. Eventually I'll become too tainted for outside use. I'll sit in your room for days, weeks, months. Then spring will roll around. Throw me in a bag and toss me away. I've accomplished my purpose. You don't need me around anymore.

There are gargoyles where your eyes should be. I know that even if there is water flowing from those grotesque trenches, you promised me that you would keep the demons from inside of you, when you were the demon the whole time.
  I have lain at your feet like a bear pelt rug and felt your toes curl into me while you read your favorite book. I have seen all of your dark ways and I have felt every cigarette you put on me in the form of your mouth. You linger in the back of my throat like a violent coughing spell, and I think I loved the burning sensation, and there is no doubt in my mind that when you slam the door I wish it was my body you were shoving into the doorjam.
  If you turn off the lights and you find that you can still see me vividly, you should remember that I know every crease in your feet and every corner of your mouth. I don't easily forget the people I have dropped to my knees for. You are every piece of paper I have ripped into shreds on your honor and strewn across the room like our clothes. Now my heart doesn't feel so good in your hands, does it?