Your fingernails give away the debris you've collected
I've known you for a while but it feels like longer
feels like sunsets under my tongue
blue bruises behind my eyes
every skip of the needle brings back our old skins &
the hush-hush type of self worth,
keeping pens full of red ink so we can
play the demon in this one instead
of closing the door, we don't wanna gossip
at the edge of the room like strangers,
we wanna be in the center
and your fingerprints look a lot like mine sometimes, especially when we laugh and cry together
especially when you fall asleep and I watch
for soft signs of openmouthed breathing that signal
we are in deeper than we thought.
I can't stand the way you look at yourself though, sometimes I wanna
run away from everyone here
sometimes I wanna just up and leave it all
in a shallow grave where it belongs,
but the moments are softer when you slip my name onto your cotton tongue,
and I don't punch out a pattern for my self loathing quite as quickly when
we tally up our thread counts and what time we have left
together.
Inevitably, I still paint my teeth black,
because words about my future never felt right coming from my pink and purple mouth
but your lips could twist anything up into a lot of sense,
I could kiss you and **** time forever
in parking lots and on the edges of stained mattresses
I didn't ever want a home until I thought of hanging up your colors to dry
keep them here in the niches or
scrawled onto notepads I keep beside my bed,
put down your demon scripts and ask me in the morning
if it takes a while for seeds to grow,
I'll tell you to keep a can of water nearby
and to make sure it's somewhere sunny
I know there's something foreign growing in me and it's
bigger than I've ever been,
but I think maybe you know and
it's bigger than both of us, maybe
you know and
you've been doing some growing, too.