I live to watch you wander from room to room in nothing but the skin you were born in,
cook me eggs (over easy) in the ****.
You are too good for me, I think, as I saunter upward toward your door in youthful eager stupor.
You were the best i'd never had before now.
I think, what a gift, your silhouette against the darkness of my loneliness.
You admit torrid fantasies, so carefully masked by mercurial aloofness.
And yet, I am young with worry that you'll grow tired of my adolescent admiration,
my minor quirks and strange tics no longer endearing months from now.
Like i've felt with all my lovers past,
curious until the novelty wears itself thin.
but for now, I memorize your movements,
and I walk home grinning,
shamelessly,
purposely,
oblivious.

I miss you like the day you left,

with tears in my eyes,

forming angry rivers of deep seeded sorrow

and jealousy that I wanted to drown in.

We never said I love you,

But we could feel it trembling behind our lips with our last kiss.

Goodbye was painful enough without the dagger of truth

cutting into our chests.

When we found that one way ticket

my heart dropped like a pin in a silent room.

You were stoic like the Mona Lisa,

determined in your lack of discontentment

while I sobbed you away.

The worst of it was in the the future of irresolution.

I would never know if you’d come to love the world

more than me.

I would never know if I wasn’t Home

for you, anymore.

I would never know, if I waited long enough,

steadfast in my domesticated loyalty.

I’d sit, like an old dog, on your tacky foyer welcome rug,

waiting to tell you that I’ve not forgotten.

And if you never came back here

I’d still miss you like the day you left.

I had to tell myself that it didn’t make sense to count days,

or months, or years, if it came to it,

because even as my Sun rises,

and your Moon also does,

we still think

of that bed

that we’d fall in

and out of.

You're making me uneasy..
I uttered with an adolescent anxiousness
that trailed, shaky, behind my words.

There is nothing wrong..* she said,
with a poignancy she couldn't hide.

There is nothing wrong..
There is nothing wrong..

I let her falsity echo quietly
through my anxious mind
while choking down
enough bottom-shelf sauce
to dull the sound.

There were tears in her eyes,
and they weren't the kind that
you'd shed from loneliness,
but the kind you'd save
'til you found yourself in bar
full of drunkards
feigning joy
while sitting across
from the person
you can't love back.

My eyes met hers with curiosity
and she wiped her face,
pulled her glass from her lips
and kissed me.

She always kissed me differently
when I worried.

You're making me uneasy.. I said again.
Stop it. There is nothing wrong..

I watched her lips spill the same lie
onto the table between us.
It formed a puddle of regret
and longing that neither of us
were ready to clean up.

There is nothing wrong..
There is nothing wrong..

I couldn't tell which one of us
needed to believe it most,
either way,
neither of us
were falling for it.

She kissed me again
and I headed for the door
still feeling uneasy
as she sat there
all alone
fighting tears.

you're projecting again;
like moonlight on frigid waters
lightly ice-layered
before the snow,
like fire off glossed stares
lost in the heat
and the moment.

you said i fell in love too fast,
i said, "no, i stay in love,
it's different."
maybe you fall out too soon
or teeter on the edge
basking
in the safe balance
of your way.

i've loved just as i've hated,
reminisced as i've seethed,
sought as i've forgotten
but loved too fast?
that's not a mistake
to me
just because love
is a mistake
to you

kate asked me to come over
to her childhood home
to meet her parents
and join their family dinner

i kept thinking, am i the type,
to bring home to mom and dad?
i am self-conscious
and i’m strange
and i wouldn’t let my daughter
date a person like me

but she insisted
that they’d love me
and they’d offered me a seat
at the head of the table

to talk about myself
and answer questions about church:
i went for 13 years and decided i hate liars..
and politics:
you’d have to be a sociopath to be a good politician..

her father had a deep guttural chuckle
with a smokey aging rasp from 40 years of
******* in the same brand of cigarettes
nestled in my front shirt pocket
i could tell he approved
in his odd, silent way

her sandy-haired mother called me
by the name
of her daughter’s ex-lover
and i couldn’t tell
if it was deliberate

but i didn’t mind
because she smiled so sweetly
and i’ve never been able to read a woman
beyond her smile
but i’ve always known
when a woman liked me

i looked at kate
and she was watching her mother and father
so closely that i thought
she may have seen something
that i missed

but then she turned to me
and smiled
and she didn’t stop
‘til we escaped to the upstairs
to **** like teenagers
in the old bedroom
across from her folks’

No matter where you were
or who you left me to
Who you left me for
or why;
I’ve written us down.

I’ve remembered every sound
every word, every curve
of your lips and
your waist.
I wrote it down.

We share a bad habit
of always coming back here
after all of our disasters;
and we spill into each other
as crimson ink
on the tattered pages
of a borrowed book.
It stands out.

I replaced our lapse in time
with a project of a girl,
a down in dumps
lost and lonesome soul —
a fixer-upper.
And still I wrote to you
and of you.

I wrote how
we’d tread lightly on new ground
each time, safe
at a distance
carefully timing the old dance
that we do twice a year
never missing a step
but still missing.

And these pages go back
quite a way,
to the first shy hello
and the first lie we told
to everyone
and to ourselves.
Sometimes the sentiment
raw and explicit,
sometimes read between
lines and lovers
Even still, our story
seems destined
to rewrite us.

by choice, we are this way

by choice, we are alone

i’d rather pine over love lost

and dwell on moments past

than wake up with that empty feeling

next to an empty shell of a girl

sad and lonely

there’s too much of myself in her

this pout-lipped stranger

she whispered nothings

almost as sweet

as the last pair of lips

i tasted

she could swoon a room

full of broken hearts

and she could make you think

you were healing

her glossed doe eyes

could see through you

and in you

and they could make you fall

deliberately

as if gravity stopped existing

she could make you forget

that the ground would hurt

even more than the last crash down

she could make you hope

that you’d be safe

at the bottom

so i lept into the air

and i’m still falling

because the hope is gone

and the ground is

a long way down