you told me to prep for a new season, that what was dying is now dead
said we must steel ourselves with warmth against the first frost, it was the worst no
it was a testament or
just a test
& here, where we carve our winters from the gentle curve of the ampersand
from punctuation that's meant to bring us closer but only moves us further apart
like the swell of a gentle tide &
even the beach must face bitter winds filled with eburnean matter meant to cling to our skin
we will reenact this act, this ampersand
you are the skin
i am the surf no
i am the sand
no
i am the snow
&
nothing is warm

i will give you things.

at first, i will give you honey suckles bound in the locks of auburn hair,
a gentle smile, a refreshing breeze. i will give you monuments dedicated to a single glance, and you will take all of these things with pleasure.

i will give you warm rain, and deep woods, and all the clichés we hear every day but we still love to talk about because we love them, i will give you love like them, like stars showing the dawn their shy bodies, like waves proclaiming all of these things i will give you.

i will give you all forms of love.

i will give you the best possible physical love, i will give you the most elegant touches and the most jarringly inappropriate whispers. yes, i will give you *******.

i will give you lessons in art, lessons in cooking, lessons in life. i will give you honesty, and truth, and commitment, and i will give you spellbound nights where all we do is talk about how the philosophers got it all wrong, that Plato was an idiot for saying we could only find death in love, look at us; look at this. i will give you the ability to teach me, i will give you the crescendo of my youth.

i will give you the crescendo of our relationship.
and then, one day, i will give you a little less. i will still give. i will still give you speeches about world events, i will give you the coffee i make in the morning, i will give you touches that aren't as passionate but they are touches nonetheless.
i will give you midnight runs to the store, i will give you medicine for when you are sick and i will give you the ability to nurse me as well.

i will give and i will give and i will give every day, each day & it will be a little less, until one day, i will give you nothing.

i will give you a profound silence, i will give you the absolute void. i will give you a pitch black abyss, nothing at all, and just when you reach the pit of despair, just when you think you've hit the bottom, the bottom will fall out and i will give you less than nothing.

i will give you screams instead of silence. i will give you hands peeled to the bone and bleeding because they have given and given and given and there's nothing less but less. i will give you a broken home, a broken heart, i will give you memories that will anchor to the bottom of your sea & know you will never be able to get rid of them because they are the skeleton of a ship wreck & did you know, in the Mediterranean there are still preserved shipwrecks in the murky depths of that ocean from Grecian times? i will give you these little reminders of mortality.

i will give you regret that sits on an empty shelf collecting dust particles. i will give you a taste for whiskey because it allows you to languish. i will give you the worst kind of wounds, the kind that time does not give a **** about, the kind that stars even pray over. i will give you a little less faith, i will diminish your ability to trust your instincts. i will give  you complete and utter devastation, i will give you repeated cliches on their backs: hurricanes, tornados, tsunamis. i will crack your collar bone, i will crack your skull. i will leave you as an abandoned house, worn down and empty.

i will give you everything, all of these things, and more; if i give you my hands right now.

I'm ruptured whole and am considered
inadequate
as my
amygdala slides through the trachea drops to my ventricles falls through the aorta plunges to my diaphragm hits the esophagus crashes to my phalanges.         There is no hope.
May I hold something over your cranium?
May I remind you of your neuron imbalance? And yet
you sit and
watch as
my septum separates from the left atrium from the right ventricle from the bicuspid from the tricuspid from the pulmonary semi-lunar valve.
I love you.                             (Stupid cerebral cortex.)
I love you.                             (Imprudent Broca's area.)
I love you.                             (Hopeless frontal lobe.)
I love your nonfunctional mind and functional soul and

Well

this is all a metaphor for unrequited love.

Step 1:    It was a marriage of convenience.
                When the bride kissed the Groom,
                The black veil slipped:
                Watch it, Groom's come undone.

Step 2:    The house is a precious gift.
                My husband smiles callously.
                The hypocrisy! He undulates to the sky.
                I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm really, really, sorry.

Step 3:    The sidewalk opens up to devour everything.
                Wonder if she'll miss me.
                The sidewalk ***** the color from the night.
                I don't care, I tell the dog.

Step 4:    They refurbish the house,
                To refurbish their souls.
                Wild reds and luscious greens
                Are replaced with a conservative blue.

Step 5:    Shall I tell you a story?
                It's about a suitcase and a lunatic,
                And how everything turned into a conservative blue.
                The sidewalk swallows everything.

4 seasons

summer
drops of salt water found their way into our crevices,
you were my best friend
and we forgot the stars,
instead counting every grain of sand on that beach strand.

when it was time for me to leave,
you sang with the waves as back up vocals,
they would bare their teeth every time you uttered the word 'love.'
it was a protest to age but you and i knew
youth had nothing to do with it.

fall
a subtle color change in the foliage appeared
and as the leaves fall,
they made the music of our matrimony.

it was all good and well
but your failures latched on to me
and god, i was 22-
carrying the burden of a 22 year old and your latest tragedies-

the leaves still turned from lush green
to cinnabar and vermillion and ochre and the more brilliant
they became the closer to death they succumbed
following a paradigm resembling our relationship.

winter
when the snow touches the ground
everything is pure- the cold woke me up.
it woke me up as you held me
pinned down
in your luxurious apartment hallway,
where two weeks before i mistook money for monogamy.

and i've never wished fatality on anyone
but i hope you freeze to death.

spring
i met you in the spring,
and here we are, two springs later.
we are watching one another bloom,
we are the honeysuckles, the poppies,
we are reconfiguring ourselves for a season
of growth and renewel,
of quiet grace and goodness.