Darlin’, they say you’ve got knives swimming through your heart beats.
That the blood flowing from your pin pricked fingertips to your mumbled fear lips
is dressed up angry, in bayonet holding coats of arms.
That your tiger tooth saber shaped blood is dragging its hands down your veins
slowly scratching in dates down walls of young membrane tombstones
shooting firing squad lines of pain as your body tears itself apart.
They’re saying that its only going to get worse from here.
With your pinstriped POW nerves vibrating like skyscrapers
as each pulse bleeds through you like a ten on the richter.

Darlin’  I’m dying to see you smile, but the washington rain is drowning you
and you're losing time for existing.
Shivering in that hospital bed as icicle cells freeze you to the bone.
You used to light up a room with all your bright sunflower laughter
but now your hands are cold like sad glaciers
pushing your shoulderblades under icy water
and all that seems to come out of your lips
are hospital bed nightmares and fluorescent smoke wishes.
Every morning your black coffee eyes brew up tears
they rain for hours.
but crying isn't dowsing this wildfire.
You’re trying to stay on your feet, but your ankle deep in gasoline.
Your breath is like a pendulum time keeper.
The white blood cell count like a stop watch for the grim reaper.
And you watch, eyes stinging, as you burn up from the inside out.
Temperature climbing mountains. Breaking ozones.
But they say you're on the decline.

Darlin’ I know they say you have bad blood.
They say that your heart won't gone on beating for a long time
and at night you cough up blood on your pillow creating a universe of helio constellations
but they don't know how hard you try.
I know right now london feels like its falling
Everything does.
Its ashes and ashes.
But like a pilot light supernova things can change.
Lets grab up fistfulls and fistfulls of ash in our shaking hands
and put them together
and let the weight of the world turn them to diamonds
and we can push them inside our nimble rib cages
and live a little bit longer

Darlin'

Can you hear me?















They asked me to speak at your funeral.
I talked about our weekend in the mountains
and how your laugh would bounce off the canyons in such beautiful frequencies.
I talked about how I met you
how my heart wouldn't stop feeling like avalanche symphonies.
And how you turned scarlet when I asked you your name.
I talked about your family, our friends,
how we would look at the stars for hours without letting our eyes breathe
because you thought the world of space.
I talked about your yellow rain boots and how you would always track the wilderness inside with you.
I talked about your fear of trains and thunderclaps and how in rainstorms you would curl up next to me and shake like an earthquake but you knew your were safe.

I talked about how much I loved you.
It started raining, I started breaking down.
And I talked about how hard you tried.

Darlin' they said you had bad blood.
That if we would have caught it sooner we could have saved you.

Darlin' I wish we had had more time.
I could have written you so many love letters.
Darlin' I wish we had had more time.





Death stole you away.

And signed your fate with a sickle cell pen of red ink.