next tuesday you'll be in surgery
and i'll be at home collecting cuts from
folding a thousand paper cranes
and letting them nip my fingertips
with their tiny beaks and feathers.
poor me, my family.
they're dying.
i can't even look them in the eyes
most of the time. how can i hope
to say goodbye, and mean it?

i'll split my ribcage
to show you how i work
if you promise not to laugh
or look repulsed.
i'm so used to cutting you open and
stretching your very heartstrings
to relieve a little tension
without you even asking
that i can create that incision blindfolded,
but when i need sutures
for a lone rose coloured ****,
i ask and you're gone.
i'm prepared to rip my ribcage apart
but you have to get a grip
of the knotted pulpous mess my organs have become
over decades of neglect
when they erupt from my chest
and sprawl at your feet.

your cherry lip gloss packs a punch.
i never wanted to sober up
from that punch drunk lust.
prom night while i lie on my left side
i hear tinnitus flirting with my right ear
she breathes into me heavily
the memory that you've been here and
i'll never feel pain like that again.
so i'll bite into my own lip until i come to understand
that wet metallic sensation
and the throbbing skin that
is passion.

open letters left to gather mould
but i'll still lick the glue on the
underside of the envelope when i
muster up enough guts to send my reply.
then i'll write to you
about the fungus that grows in my lungs
and the days that i've been coughing up blood
because if you're worried about my health
you're sure to write back soon.
i resort to dead flesh and scarlet chests
to get the slightest hint of affection,
sometimes it works and it's worrying
because you really shouldn't care about me.

i look at all of these perilously perfect poems and i want to SCREAM
life, your life, mine is not a dream this is not a picturesque reality
please---can we try for a bit of authenticity? c'mon i mean
we all love roses and the sunset gleam but your life isn't
an oil painting (or a tv screen) so can somebody sit down
and write a few lines about the dull gray sky or how her eyes
looked less like a forest and more like a swamp (with flies)?

we spilled my thoughts
into a thousand coffee cups
across your bedroom floor and
we drank them all.
all that night i stared through your skylight
searching for a constellation big enough
to describe us.

when the ice breaks beneath our feet
will you wake up next to me
in the hospital bed?
with an intravenous drip in
your forearm again.
the aroma of ammonia perforates my
limbic system and emotions and memories
just gush into me relentlessly,
sheer bliss funnels through
the corridors and chemical stores
and finds its rest in my room.
the walls are moist with dopamine.
my bones could break with the weight of
this happiness and it'd only drag on
for longer.
i'd wake up laughing and it made
everyone uncomfortable.