You are the spines of a prickly pear cactus
Too small to see
Embedded in my skin
But my body usually pushed the cactus needles out over time
You’re still there
I never pushed you away

Our love is Schrödinger’s cat,
not sure if it is hiding
before it was unleashed from the box
We never talked about it, I just hold you in my dreams
Dead on arrival
Waking to nothing

The closeness of you is the tattoo machine sting
A good kind of hurt
It leaves me with art spilling on my skin
You leave me with glowing in my bones
But unlike tattoos I’m never healing
raw and rough with the repeated hum of shading
Trying to make a gray area where there is none
Bones can’t hold ink, only holes

You are not sending a secret code reaching out across the rift
A divide carves between us like the ache of Pangea’s faults
But you were born into this new world
You don't know of a time when the land held hands
You didn't feel the rending
It was real for me

A gray morning fog
Mist shrouding the top of the buildings, mountains, creeping into valleys
I am sure that they are still there, waiting
I didn't realize I was waiting
Waiting for the wheel to spin around
For your smile to sun me again
Maybe
“I love you”
will evaporate from my lips
without you even noticing it

You do not know that my crush is still riptide
our love is dragging me under
but the waves lap at your ankles
As you watch so many ships

This is the film I never put in my camera
The alternate timeline
You can see it in the corner of your eye
And on the lips of the dead that gather in graveyards
Telling you of the world in which they and we are whole

Our love is sunspot
Our love is electromagnetic pulse
Our love is sending me spiraling into the deep nothing
Our love is dying star
It will become something else in time
I wish “I love you“ would evaporate from my lips
But it is just plasma carved there again