you don't see colour anymore,
maybe you're looking at it all in the wrong light.
you say optimism is a shapeshifter that makes you think a blade is a rose stem.
red, like the petals you use to place in my hair that now look dead.
I use to write sonnets about your cupids bow and eyelashes, but the child who never felt loved doesn't believe in details, doesn't believe in the fine lines.
so when you ask him to tell you why he never cries when he has every right to, he tells you it's because he can't feel.
and you wonder, if he means he can't cry anymore, or ever.
but he just can't bring himself to let emotion fill the vacant waiting room of his lungs.
he has dirt on his knees & a cut across his lip.
now I write about mending beautiful things that I know can't be fixed.
he can't help but smile, a habit he declares a flaw.
he's the only person I've ever known without laughter lines, who puts his dimples to waste.
he still looks for a home, though he thinks he can find it in himself he's forgotten he's not the only one who never felt comfortable in their skin, born and abandoned.
but maybe that's the difference between us,
orphan by chance, I scraped the walls looking for picture frames filled with memories that never existed.
orphan by choice, you crumpled all the images of me & through them I to a pile labeled "I'll get to it one day"
I want to know that love can be a fairytale, that I can roll out of this tomb I named my body, to turn a page and know that there's another chapter.
I want to know he cherishes these moments by pinning them to his wall, but will he ever look up?
is he afraid there are no longer walls to keep his home together?
or does he live in a glass house?
transparency makes the perspective set in,
but the rain is coming down outside blanketing his home.
he can't see.
he can't see me.
waiting on the front porch.

the real storm is inside, darling.
you can't escape the hurricane in your mind.
it tells you you're unloved.
oh, how the world can be so unkind.