Sweet, like the way a flame feels on your skin before it starts to burn.
Slow, like how I fell for you in the middle of fall and kept you safe all winter long.
Don't worry about this darkness, baby.
The darkest day is almost over and the light is coming.
The light is coming.
And you tell me,
"Please never fall in love again."
And how could I? How could I find something that matches your laugh,
Or your lazy hands on my skin when the sun peaks through the windows,
or the smile that emerges when we kiss for too long and you can feel my touch wandering around, looking for scraps.
You are not like him in the best ways.
You are so gentle that it makes me feel breakable.
If you want to shatter me to pieces just have mercy. I'd rather not hear the echo of it breaking,
But I won't stop you from destroying it.
Oh, my love, this is going to hurt.
Those thoughts are a like a memory, they don't last in the illumination of your love that feels so final, so imminent like I am walking to my own grave but you are waiting for me in the dirt.
Every place, even a hole in the ground, is home when you are holding my hand.
We could never speak anything but melodies;
Anything but devotion in the spaces between breaths.
Finishing the gaps of your sentences,
You trail off and I'm there to voice the verse.
Our love dog eared like a book reread a hundred times over,
I keep coming back and reading my favorite parts aloud.
Our love like one of those movies where they say,
"if somebody gave me the choice right now, to never see you again or to marry you, I would marry you."
Tender words to throw around, to spare
I could never get tired of the way you talk about me like a metaphor for something divine,
Waking up in the middle of the night to profess my love for you,
If only to hear it come out of my mouth,
If only to watch that look spread across your face in the darkness.
That look where your eyes are to the ceiling and I know you're thanking god.
I wake you up just to kiss you and you never mind the interruption.
Our love like a hundred similes for heaven,
When you break my heart it will hurt like hell.
But we're not there yet, I'm skipping to the finale, I'm reading
Our story backwards out of fear for how it ends.
Those last pages,
Those blank pages, staring back at me, begging me to write
Some soft closure, an end that doesn't spark like a match and light
This chapter ablaze.
Let me hold onto these charred pages, I can find the ending somewhere in the smoke,
But I'm not looking for it anymore, I leave the poems unfinished
And the book open wide.
I'm trying to write a love poem that isn't caked in sadness and you show me how to move my hands just right.
You show me where to touch and when to kiss, you teach me
All the mechanisms for a happy ending, and you hold it in your hands like a gift you're giving to me every morning.
This anecdote like a never ending tragedy that all love is destined to become.
We are not All love, we are not People, we are the main characters for the greatest adventure ever written.
We sing poetry back and forth and neither of us are bleeding.
I will reread this over and over,
Keep it in my back pocket for the train,
Let the rain soak it and the sun dry it completely,
Destroy it,
And when it falls apart in my hands
I will get on my knees and scrawl my favorite lines in chalk on the asphalt.
I will write them in the smoke of mirrors, in our coffee cups,
On our pillowcases.
I will tell this story,
Our story,
Over and over like a lesson I am trying to learn.
You move my hands just right across the paper and it looks like love.