you love her, don't you?   
because she's beautiful; 
she's exciting; 
she's empyreal.  
because she kisses like these are her final moments of life  
and she wants to spend them only with you. 
 
but be careful who you trust (the devil was once an angel, you know). 
she makes your heart flutter, but  
anyone'll tell you that really,  
arrhythmia isn't a good thing.  
 
she's a disguise, grief wrapped up like a gift. 
oh, darling, she's a pretty war. ****** in her veins.  
 
(but) 
 
let's go from the start. 
 
your bones don't fit  
you feel as though your throat is all sandpaperandnails 
you're alone. you've been ohsolonely.
 
then you meet her and she's all chocolateandcinnamon and     
    perfectly 
                aligned. 
 
you look into her eyes. you see a nebula.  
an interstellar cloud but made up of something you should know but don't.  
she's  dumbfounding; 
it's refreshing.  
you like mysteries.  
 
she’s  everything  you’ve  ever wanted (probably) and she pulls you out of that hole. 
that one with the festering thoughts  
and the dark spaces where you could go for days at a time. 
your heart was heavy, a sky full of rain.  
but she was a tempest. your saving grace. 
 
this is a story about love, but it's not a love story.  
not really. 
this is a story about the human condition, 
about how, though the heart isn’t the *****  
that makes us feel, 
it still hurts the most. 
and more importantly, this is an open letter 
to the skies, 
to whichever deity decided that you couldn’t 
be with her forever. 
 
you're a house with empty rooms and 
there's a storm teasing the windows; 
an aggressive ballet. 
looking back, 
you suppose you should have noticed the leak 
before it got the chance to flood 
 
and you remember the look in her eyes when you said  
"even though I did geography at school, it didn't teach me  
the difference between an earthquake 
and you" 
and she said she didn't understand  
and you said * that's the point, neither do I.*

for to love someone 
is to give them your heart on a platter 
and hand over the cutlery, too. 
but you remember just thinking oh,  
if she makes you giddy like this then  
what could be wrong? 
 
you know that "gravitation is not responsible 
for people falling in love" 
but the force with which you feel the desire 
to present your heart like a gift, to 
open yourself to the possibility of hurt and break 
must be greater than yourself 
 
and you never knew why they called it  
"heartbreak" until the day she left 
and you realised after, that the difference  
between you and humpty dumpty 
is that his friends thought he was worth trying to  
put back together again. 
 
the thing is that 
empty rooms echo, and now 
so do you. 
 
and after that, 
after the fallout 
and the body count of all your past selves 
they'll say to you: 
you're young 
it's not the end of the world.
but 
when someone makes flowers grow in your lungs  
and then makes you choke on them 
it feels like it is. 
 
you know what? 
you notice empty spaces more 
once your chest becomes one. 
 
a house of cards 
imagine matchsticks; 
burning love but 
singeing your fingers, 
and she never asked why you flinched 
 
her palms, eden. 
her kiss of death, 
her purgatory embrace. 
she, aokigahara, suicide forest. 
you were born to die in her arms. 
 
and if you ever wondered
why they name tornadoes after girls, 
you don't now. 
 
you, lacklustre lazarus­. 
you know you're no phoenix; 
the ashes consume. 
 
so here you are. 
and ode to you, 
because words shouldn't be like bullets, 
staccato, and 
vowels shouldn’t have sharp edges- 
but they do. 
 
you see, 
poetry is the place love goes when it dies, 
the place where heartbreak is framed with metaphors 
and mounted on the wall as art. 
a library of all the things left unsaid. 
 
the psychiatrist takes lots of notes. 
about how you thought she was your   
deus ex machina, 
about how you remembered too late that this is real life  
and really, all of this is just a periphrasis. 
 
you think 
sticks and stones, sticks and stones 
but the truth is that words 
are like bullets, 
and her tongue the gun; 
her “goodbye” ricocheting against her teeth. 
 
now, today, it’s you with the weapon;  
taking control the way god never did. 
cold metal and clammy hands. 
cleaning up the mess left behind 
by a tornado named her. 
 
b a n g.