The leaves are falling outside, like harbingers of
a season filled with warmth in colours and
cold winds, with pumpkin spice and blankets
and pillow forts, and the idea that endings
are beginnings, to the patient ones.
I love the golden sun and sweater days of Autumn,
love the fading freckles and the laughter lines
it paints on my face, and the silent knowledge that,
among candlelight and the smell of coffee,
everything comes alive. My fingers tangle in
a hand-knitted sleeve, and hot tea warms me
from the inside, until I am like soft caramel.
His fingers brush my skin and linger, like
a promise made and meant and kept.

Legs tangled together, clammy skin on skin, and the sun
rising behind pointed rooftops, painting the sky
an aquarelle of budding peonies and candied orange peel.
Bruised lips taste of chocolate and blueberries, and the
white wine from last night. My arms feel heavy and
my soul is featherlight, soaring into the sunshine.
The morning air is crisp in a way that announces
summer heat for the coming day, and a discarded blouse
moves with the breeze. Life is eminent yet strangely
far away from this corner of the earth that we have
burrowed ourselves into, hidden from the universe.
The city hums with life and wisdom and love, and we
have watched it burst into song and whisper quietly
but it has never seemed as beautiful as now.
Fingers link together like souls have, and lips brush
in a greeting, in recognition, and then smile.

i guess that lately all i can write about is love
and how could i not when the feeling is simply overwhelming;
it swallows me up into its deep clear seas of adoration
and i have never learned how to swim.
i do not write about the love they write books about,
i write about the love that makes up poems
because love that is so encompassing and destructive
is something that is best expressed in choppy words and stanzas.
it is not something you can write a novel on
and if you could, nobody would read it anyway.
it is not something you can dress in pretty words
and send out for others to read in front of a fireplace.
the love i write about lately is the one that makes you heart hurt,
the one that makes you wish you were better, and makes you realise you're not,
the love that makes you hate other people because you know they are better than you
- better for him, they can make him smile -
it is the kind of love that makes you scream your feelings out into your pillow at 2 am
and that makes you sink instead of fly.
the kind that people read when they feel just the same,
the kind they hide under their blankets because they don't want
their friends to know that despite them saying that they're beautiful,
they know they're not, not to that one person that is, to them,
the single most beautiful thing.
lately, all i seem to do is write about this love
because lately, it seems to be all that i can feel,
with all that comes with it to bite at my soul with its brilliant sharp teeth -
lately, all i seem to do is think about him,
and i drown in the kind of love they write poems about.
it is not a happy love, not now and i doubt it ever will be
and maybe one day i will be able to look at him without blushing and feeling longing tug at my heart,
maybe one day i will learn ow to swim and not fall in love this easily,
maybe one day i will be able to write a novel about kids playing on the streets
instead of a poem about me wanting to die;
but right now, all i can seem to do is hate myself a little bit
and love him a little bit more every day.
but yes - maybe, one day, i can write about being in love with someone,
and how it feels to be loved back
not him, i know we aren't meant to be,
but maybe someone who, like me, dives before they've tested waters.

Red lips curl watching Earl Grey unfold in clouds inside a cup
and brown eyes flicker over long fingers folded around porcelain.
She is a carefully written poem on ivory paper, royal blue
ink blooming on a page, kissed and tied with a ribbon.
She is a timeless woman, inhabiting a thousand eras.
Her sharp eyes have outlived the courts of many kings,
have seen revolutions unfold and succeed and be shattered;
she has watched fights started over her in warm saloons and
soapboxed revolution on Boston Common, smiling dangerously.
She is the brightest of all muses.
He is in his element, shining bright with eyes like starlight,
a compliment to the beauty he saw first of everyone.
I feel a soft adoration for what she is to him, and think how
that, really, is poetry.

i know that you do not love yourself.
you never pretend you do, just
sometimes pretend to be alright.
i like to think i understand you
better than that, that i see through
red-painted lips faking a smile;
i like to think i know you a little;
enough, at least, to see beneath
the skin i fear is littered with scars and
see the dark blue sea of nothingness.
i feel like i can watch you drown some days,
pulled under by its waves of despair
and somehow, you're forgetting how to swim.
i wish that i could pull you out,
but i cannot reach you and i wish
that i was strong enough, just enough.
i know this is not how it works and yet
my heart clenches because i know
you are in your room crying
and i am in mine, too far away,
and all i can do is fill pages with thoughts
and worries, handwriting shaky.
i do not know how to help you;
i do not know how to be enough
to make you feel good enough.

at night we look over the city
illuminated by a kind of shifting gold
it makes me fall in love with it
and all its beauty -
but most of all, i fall in love with
you and the way you share this with me;
this moment, this place, and yourself -
my heart feels like it wants to stay,
allow you to have me for the rest of our lives,
and my body is already leaving,
so close to the airport gate,
while you watch me with that look in your eyes
that makes me want to turn around
and wipe my tears and stay with you
for as long as our lives allow me to.
(another day will have to come for both of us;
we will not see the dawn together, but it will come)

I am in love with a man who bleeds sunlight
and whose eyes wash tsunamis against
the harsh shadows of his lashes on his cheeks.
He hides an untamed storm inside of him,
waves crashing into rocky shores while the sky
drowns in blue; and I drowned in him.

He is not a robin, but he carried my heart
through bleeding skies and fireworks.
He is gone now, chasing after new dreams
while I bury what he’s decided has died
and choke on the secrets I never realised
he kept from me, hanging on my wall in
a morbid display of blindness and loss.

My heartache is a war cry in the darkest night,
shattering the windows of my soul until
tears leak out to grow a new Atlantic,
now that I cannot look in his eyes again.
I drown in the knowledge that he has
covered me with scars from wounds that
never were mine, but that I bled from still.

I hope one day he can learn to love
something without making it bleed, and
maybe I can learn to remake my heart
out of something that isn’t glass, and
not to giftwrap it every time I feel warmth,
and to stay far away from the shore.

- He is a hurricane, and I have always loved storms. c.s.

i am afraid of darkness but
the night has always been my friend
half asleep during the day
i feel the most alive when everyone else is sleeping
like my mind cannot function among so many others
and my soul uncrumples now it's given space
it folds out into a vast array of colours
and among them i can see memories that have become pieces of me
and shaped my being. there is
your lavender touch when we were
riding high among the clouds and i felt space was getting smaller
and pastel blue tears from when the waves drug me to the ground
it's funny how this works
how what i fear irrationally makes up my only refuge
how while i feel the darkness creeping in
and i fear every corner and the whole world outside my bed
the night still gives me comfort and a reassurance of myself
in the darkness things become clearer
like the absence of light sheds light upon them
maybe that is how feelings work
maybe that is why at night i feel the most in love with you


cs

my friend doesn't believe me when i say i was upset
she says, at least you had enough composure to
talk about it and defend yourself. i answer with
an awkward laugh, "i guess i'm kinda good at
pretending i'm not crying on the inside," i say.
neither of us realised, in that one moment,
how true my words had been, not even me.
she laughed and still didn't believe me and i
never stopped to think about what i had said.
now, in the dark of the night, it catches up with me -
i am a master of disguise, dressed up as an
eighteen-year-old with a permanent smile, i am
the queen of all actors, with an optimism
that people say is my best quality, when it is one
that i have never had. i guess i'm kinda good at
pretending i'm not crying on the inside, because
that seems to be all i do every day, and it seems like
it has become what i am now.
there is an art to faking happiness for so long that
people say it is what makes you you, when really,
sadness is what makes up your soul.
it is a mastered art when you start believing it yourself,
when you have to think back and realise that
you were miserable the whole time, because
even to yourself you look happy in the pictures.
i guess we are all good at something, after all -
though, for me, it is not the smile that you adore,
or the optimism that has picked you up at times,
or the enthusiasm for trying new things.
for me, it is the art of faking a new me,
the art of acting in everyday life, all day,
the art of fooling even myself with the notion
that i could ever be happy.

I am scared to fall in love
Because who does so gets broken
And my heart is too broken already to risk
I am scared to fall in love
Because I remember that boy I loved so much
Back when I was young
With a freckled nose and a high school diploma
Still wet with ink, so new
And I felt like I could take on the world
And maybe take him with me
But the truth is that he never even knew
And I don't think he even slightly liked me
While I pined for him day after day
Dropped hints he only tripped over and
I watched him get with his perfect girl
While I cried and drank tea and wrote sad poetry
So I really don't think
I'm made for love
I just love very stupidly
So really please please just don't push me because
I might fall for you and when I do
It might fall out of my pocket or chest
And get lost and shatter, and all the rest--
I lose my heart so easily.  


cs

I can never be the first one to say "I love you" -
She's told me so a million times,
Even when the only kissing we did
Was in my dreams:
"Do this for me, I'll love you forever"
"That was so funny; I love you, Jo"
It means such a different thing now
That I can feel her bare skin on mine
And not wake up in the morning
To find out that it was all a dream;
Now that I can kiss her lips on the streets
And whisper her gracious name.

I cannot tell her I love her because
I am afraid that she'll say it back -
I know she does not love me yet,
Not the way that I love her, with all I have,
So if she said those words again
I would know she could never see
The kind of love I have for her -
We'd mean "I love you" differently.

I cannot let that happen to us
Because it would mean the end -
That what we have will never mean to her
What I have wished for it to mean since we met.
So I keep my mouth shut when it wants
To scream her name from rooftops in Berlin
I keep my mouth shut when it wants
To tell her she's my favourite sin.

I can never be the first one to say "I love you" -
I need to hear her say it differently first.

- js

I do not mind my walls falling, crumbling, being overrun;
you are a compassionate conqueror, and there is
sweetness in surrender, safety in your reign.
Within blankets like dunes of snow, we lie surrounded by
words not said, yet felt and known and understood.
The earth moves around the sun, and the moon
pulls water across oceans, and you are beautiful.
It is true every minute of every day, and I know it.
I suspect the stars also align at your will, but you
have told me they dance in my eyes; and reality is
flexible and water-slick in the morning hours before the sun.
You reign me in to fit into the present but let
my soul fly unguarded and unchained; you let
my heart dance with yours yet to its own beat.
Luminous supernovas and galaxies flutter over your face,
reflect on the bridge of your nose, cast shadows and brightness.
I am at a loss for words; this universe, or maybe
the language I share with you, that isn't mine,
does not have the words, is not enough to describe
you, and who you are, your significance and what you mean -
I can think of three, and they dance on my tongue.

- "i love you" cs

there should be a oscar for the best smile
in the situation of a breaking heart.
i have become the greatest actress these past months,
swearing happiness in rhymed couplets,
and faking laughs while my soul cried.
i know you feel the same way i do:
and you deserve recognition for this performance
i can watch from across the pub -
your laugh seems genuine, your eyes are not,
as you wish them a happy honeymoon,
and secretly wish he was with you.
we deserve a prize, you and me, for an act
so accomplished only other actors can see.
we are the greatest pretenders, after all,
as we weep on the inside but carry on,
swearing to everyone but each other
that we are, we will be alright,
that we are not in love with what isn't,
that we won't forever be wishing
for what will never be.

(we deserve an award at least,
because we know we will never have them.)

cs

we met only a few months ago,
so really, even though you're my best friend,
my other half, miraculously found across an ocean,
it feels too early to tell you of my soul.
i cannot tell you yet how broken it is,
how i sometimes drown in its black oceans of nothing,
and how i can still feel now-invisible scars on my wrist.
i am afraid of losing you, and everyone else -
you are so new to me and to my life
that you still see me as a carefree child
when really, i stopped being her years ago,
way before i was allowed to drive or drink or vote.
you do not know the miles i have walked
to be where i am now, you do not know
how much blood and tears i have shed for myself.
it is too early yet to let you know all of me,
and i hope that when i do, it will not be too late,
but right now, my hope that you will see me
as someone who never broke is bigger,
and my fear of you not wanting to deal
with damaged goods is too strong.
it's too early yet to let you know how ****** up i am.

i wonder if you sometimes think of me - not the way i think of you,
i know that you don't see me the way that i see you
(like you're my sun and like you hung the stars,
like you're the most beautiful thing i have ever seen)
but i sometimes wonder if i sometimes cross your mind,
i wonder if my face pops up behind your eyes,
and if you wonder if that is because I've thought of you
(if that saying was true, you would only be seeing me);
i wonder if what you see me as, and if you know that
every time i look at you, my heart wants to run away from me,
i wonder if you can see it in my blush, or if my friends have told you.
i wonder if you've ever thought what it would be like
to be in love with me. it's all i do every day, after all,
(or rather every night) to think about what we could be,
when i know, deep within me, that we never could.
i wonder if you sometimes think of me, or if
i am as far from your mind as that one boy was from mine,
the one who told me that he loved me, the one i told
that you cannot love someone from afar, not truly.
i have tried to apologise to him, but he has moved away,
and now i am him and you are me, except you are
so much more perfect than anything that i could ever be.
i know you'll never think of me the way i think of you,
i know that you could never love me the way that i do you,
i know that you could never look at me like i am
the most beautiful thing this planet has ever seen,
and i know that you are an unrequited dream.
but i wonder if you sometimes think of me - not the way i think of you,
but just at all. for all the hope i don't allow myself, i still hope you do.


cs

you made a poet fall in love with you:
did you expect her not to fill pages
with how she felt for you,
did you expect her not to spend ages
trying to find the right words for you
(and none seemed beautiful enough);
you made a poet fall in love with you,
did you expect her not to make you her muse,
did you expect her not to write about you
the way she writes about everything she adores?
you kissed a poet goodnight after every date:
did you expect her not to scribble verse after verse
choppy stanzas about the way your lips felt on hers;
did you expect her not to gush about it
to her best friend - even if it was a piece of paper;
did you expect her not to make that feeling,
and the promise it made, the promise of you,
into the only art she was capable of
- because that's what you were, to her?
you made a poet fall in love with you,
and when you broke her heart in two,
did you expect her not to write about it
when that was the only catharsis she knew?
did you expect her not to splatter ink over pages,
hastily, the way she wished her blood could spill;
did you expect her not to write about your skin
on hers, into a notebook, at 2 a.m.
while you were drinking beer and laughing with a friend?

you made a poet fall in love with you,
and expected her not to make her art about you;
you broke a poet's heart, you shattered it,
and you expected her to walk away from it,
without any lines written about
how it tears her apart and
how you still have her heart --
you made a poet fall in love with you,
and when you broke her apart,
expected that to be all, but that's not who we are.
you did not get what you expected her to be,
but then again, you left her -
so in the end, i guess neither did she.

Cups of coffee and plates with sugar crumbs
from pastry warm with cinnamon and cardamom,
and books overturned on antique tables
with scruff marks and scratches, loved, well-used,
(and me, in the middle of it all, listening to the
heartbeat of this country and its sincerity,
learning wisdom through small things).
He is a six foot springtide of caffeine and literature,
effervescent with sincerity and kindness and warmth.
I smile at him over the rim of my cup, and
suddenly I am swept up and moving with
his current, in love with him and a summer
spent scribbling into casebound notebooks
and with my hair flying in the wind that rustles
the trees around us, and with his lips on my neck.
Wild roses on brick walls and wooden window frames,
and the lavender growing on the curb all smile,
content to witness summer love bloom like
all things tend to do, in this season and this place.
I let him explain to me the stars in nights that
never seem to really begin but last forever;
he teaches me in not-quite darkness what
they mean, and I tell him under fairy-lights
how small I feel in the multitude of this universe.
He nods solemnly and I feel his breath in my hair,
holding me on this earth as he shows me galaxies.

- lund. cs.

sometimes, it's okay not to be okay
this, in itself, is something we all know,
or maybe we think we do,
because in the end, we're never allowed to.
i tell you it's okay not to be okay -
it's the normal thing.
let yourself be not okay,
cry it out or crawl back into yourself.
it's okay to feel miserable sometimes,
it's okay to not want to care,
and it's okay to do.
it's okay not to be okay,
because we all are sometimes,
and we deserve to.

i came to you for a straight path
with no crossroads and walls at the sides
to lock in my free mind as best one can;

but you built my dreams back up instead
like collapsed buildings after a war
(which, in a way, they were);
you restored me at the start.

for pocket change, you took my soul
and folded it until it was an origami crane
that soared over mountaintops and deep blue seas
and lived off hopes and wishes and dreams;
a tiny piece of paper, flower print
that came to life to watch the foxtail valleys
and toblerone mountains of my mind
and it watched the memories of me riding among the clouds
and swimming in clear turquoise waters
and crying over friendships lost.
we will always remain that way
you form me, fold me, throw me into the air
while I remain, just cellulose, pliant, never my own -
yours to be ripped apart.

it was what i came for, after all.


cs

she says she ain't pretty in that southern voice of hers
and yet i still feel like her kindness alone makes her so very beautiful;
she doesn't see what i see when she looks at herself
and somehow she sees things in me that i never could -
maybe we are the same, me and her, i don't know
but what i am certain of is this: she doesn't see her own value.
money could buy a thinner waist but never pay for a heart like hers
and that is what's important, in the end, in a world like ours.
maybe if we all start to understand this,
the world won't automatically become a better place -
but i think it's a good place to start.

i should have known, in the end
that boys like you don't like the sad girls
the broken girls, the fallen ones
the ones who cut their wrists and cry and night
boys like you don't like the sad girls
you want the happy girls, the pretty ones
the ones who cut only their hair and cry at weddings
i am of the first kind
a girl so sad the sadness overwhelms me
and in the end, i can only cover so much with smiles
so in the end, i knew you would leave me

they said we were a kind of skinny love
but i guess it was too thin for you to see
or maybe you just wanted something more
wanted someone that i could never be
skinny love is something that tends to run thin
and tends to disappear too soon
and love is something you can never win
it must be given - you didn't, not to me.

when I fall in love,
I burst into flames.

- some fires burn longer than others. cs

"life is a gamble at terrible odds
if it was a bet, you wouldn't take it"
it seems like i already have;
on the inside, i spin coins against myself.
life's odds are not as bad without love
but love has odds stacked high against me;
especially in moments like this
when i marvel over how beautiful he looks
against the city lights at 2am -
moments like this one end up being
moments in which he leans over to my friend
and tells her she is the prettiest he's ever seen.
(she, later on, will tell me she thinks he's not too bad
i will, to myself, scoff at her understatement
but tell her to go for him, "he's cute"
and spend that night crying on my own)
if love was a bet, you wouldn't take it
but i already have.
against the city lights at 2am,
he calls me a taxi and that's the last i'll see of him.


cs

i missed your skin when you were east,
yearned for your touch as we slept under the same stars
and yet you were miles and an ocean away from feeling
my hands touch yours and my mouth love your lips
as we both looked at the same moon at different times,
and i felt cold raindrops hit my face while you
watched as apple blossoms glittered in the sun;
you studied words written long before our time
and called me late at night to whisper flowing stanzas
of iloveyous that were smoke in the blackness of a room
while i listened and we both pretended not to hear my tears
become stains on a pillowcase that did not feel like mine
(for the absence of your scent on it, and because it was not).
at day, i surrounded myself with things that could not be further
from everything you loved, if only to not think of your smile.
i swung scalpels like heavy swords in an eternal war
against the cruel sisters who had chosen to separate us,
as if the miles between us were their scissors to our pieces of string;
and i calculated numbers that told me people's fate
while remembering how you always hated mathematics.
your words were like balsam to my soul, the way i hoped
i could one day be for everyone, and you always
seemed to suffer so much less than me, because i did not know
of the tears you shed after putting down your phone.
you missed my lips while i dreamt of you at night,
and as the atlantic roared between us, i thought how
fitting it was that tears are made of saltwater.

Cold rain pelting on my skin,
city lights reflected in the wet black tar of
a road almost too narrow for the cars racing by -
all this I saw last when you were standing by my side,
feeling the nighttime city live and breathe around us
as we watched people scurry by and call for taxis in the cold.
It has never felt lonely to me before, I never saw
how isolated you are in a city when you're standing in its heart,
watching the blood pump through veins around you
and yet not moving, stagnancy amidst torrents.
A neon light flickers across the street from me
and I am ripped out of my dream to realise
you are not with me this time.
I see you in every street lamp;
around every corner I expect to see your face
to face only myself in the mirror of a dark shop window.
My face looks unexpectedly hollow,
my shape unfamiliar without you next to it,
and I wonder when my life became about you.
I do not belong here, into this city where
lights gleam bright even in the darkest hours
and sirens scream agony all night long.
I am from a different world, one where
dogs run free across wide fields and along rivers
and the air smells of fresh-cut grass in spring.
I am from a world where nobody locks their door
and stone-and-wood houses are made to live in,
not concrete boxes where numbers rule lives.  
All this was once foreign to me, and is again;
I do not belong with the neon lights and cinemas,
the glass facades and cold black tar,
I do not belong with the flashing ads and loud sirens,
the people who don't smile as they walk by.
All these things remind me of you.
I was one of them, one of the souls that made up this city
but I cannot live in it when you are not here.
I do not belong here anymore,
among the thousand lights that remind me of your eyes
and the constant noise that sounds like your breath.
All this reminds me too much of you.

sometimes phrases don't make it into poems
and paragraphs are written but not part of the book.
love is just like that.
so don't you dare tell me that i can't
feel heartache over what i never had
i have the right to feel pain when she holds his hand
and feel sick when he tells me of their first kiss
and feel like it should be me even though it never was.
i have the right to love what does not love me back
and feel pain from the loss of a love i never had
just like this is not a real poem
and it won't make it into any book
but i still write it, by myself,
and it exists.


cs

maybe i just
care too much for you -
i care so much that it destroys me
a little bit every day.
you would laugh at me
if you knew of my lavender dreams
of sunshine and kisses and you,
but i do not feel
like it is foolish to love you
much rather, it is what i need -
maybe i need to love someone
to feel like i'm able to feel


cs

i see you across the bar and i know you're like me,
an actor in the play of genuine happiness,
and when you buy me a drink i don't refuse
because we understand each other, and,
at least for a few hours, i can be what you need.

tonight we will be swearing love to each other
in rhymed couplets and the touch of sweaty skin,
because that is how we lie, you and me,
and we have grown so accustomed to this way of
never telling the truth that we convinced ourselves
we were meant to be actors, that we feel the truth.

tonight i will swear to be yours, and you mine
while we both wish for someone else's hands on our skin
and their lips on our mouth, sighing iloveyou.
we are the same, you and me, buried 10 feet under
the hard concrete of a love that will never be
and all we can do some nights to lessen the pain
is find others like us, and pretend to love them.

i hope you're happy, wherever you are, with what you are doing.
you do not know that i am not, and i both cannot change it
and would not even if i could - this is who we are now.
we have drifted apart and while you have found an island and
invited all our friends, nobody speaks to me and the saltwater burns my skin.
i am sorry for what i said, but not for what happened -
i just wish it had happened differently. i am sorry for telling you
how i felt when i had never done so before - it was new to you.
you must understand that while i hate how things are now,
i cannot regret much - i do not mean to sound callous,
but rather i want to, just once, tell the truth - while am lonely, i am free.
you may not realise the toxicity of your words as they caress your tongue
but they burned my skin with their acidic touch
and dissolved my soul into something i neither recognised nor liked.
i wish you all the best, and you'll remain a part of me,
but now i cannot bear to see your face because i have seen
what it looks like under the mask of lipstick smiles and sharp eyeliner
and the truth of who you were to me, and made me be, is terrifying.
still, while you made me something i cannot be while keeping myself,
you made me smile and feel something akin to ... happiness, i suppose;
so i watch you take away what i have left without resentment -
i know you feel you need revenge, and i will not be the one
to keep your closure from you when i am finding mine.
this is the last present i can still give to you now that i'm gone.
i hope the spring air washes the poison off your tongue,
and that you can be happy with the people who loved me once;
i hope you can find enough happiness to neutralise the acidic hate
that made me leave a person i loved so immensely behind.
i have never been the one who left, but i cannot go on.

someone is probably
in love with you right now -
even though
you think you're boring
and stupid
and weigh too much
and sometimes smell bad;
someone probably
saw you last week and
wiped their sweaty hands
on the insides of their pockets
and thought about
your body under your
favourite sweater
(that you think everyone hates)
and about
how you would look
asleep in their bed.

At night when you love me I get lost in you,
entranced in the gentleness of your hands
and the glory of your skin upon mine.
You bury your hands in my curls and
sigh loudly - you are a primal thing,
and I'm the pagan to enshrine you.
You are my only true religion,
a god bathed in the glittering sheen of perspiration
like in the richest clothing, covering
the most astonishing beauty of all.
I am a slave in your temple and you are
the only thing I worship; the only thing I still believe in
as I sacrifice myself in the flames of your altar.

There is not enough coffee in this world to keep my soul awake,
not when I cannot sleep most nights but rise before the sun,
and my eyes sting sharply every second they are open,
unable to stand the brightness of the world and its people —
not when it is plastered over misery and poverty, and hopeless hearts.
There is not enough sunlight in this world to light up what we bury
in the dark, with memories and bodies and time capsules,
not enough band aids to cover up the pain our mistakes have caused,
and there can never be enough time to undo regret.

I live in the constant knowledge that I was not enough
to change the world, or myself in it, or to make you understand
that despite being eloquent, I am not articulate enough
to describe how I feel, about you and this planet, both filled
with endless riddles, and pain, but, inexplicably, also love.

how am i going to wake up and know
i won't be seeing you all day?
and how are you going to fall asleep
without my body pressed into yours?
who is going to get me
that raspberry ice cream that i love so much
and hug me when all i can do is cry;
and who is going to get you
nando's and a cupcake and a movie
and stay with you all night when you're sick?
who am i going to share my dessert with?
and who's going to eat the rest of my pizza
late at night in a dingy takeaway?
we are both falling apart piece by piece
because we are drifting apart inch by inch.
i cannot be without you.
i've forgotten who i am on my own.

the greatest art comes from broken hearts,
so maybe i should thank you for making me cry at night
because this way at least i can find
catharsis in a notebook and a pen over what i feel for you.

the greatest poems come from shattered souls,
so maybe i should thank you for making me fall in love,
only to fall for one of my friends instead,
because this way at least i can write
and writing is, after all, the thing i do best
(maybe, that is because i have loved you for so long).

the greatest books come from abandoned dreams
so maybe i should thank the world for ruining all of mine,
because this way at least i can write
and have people like me read my thoughts at night.

the greatest people stem from the ashes of
their dead pasts that they have buried in the woods,
so maybe i should thank the entirety of the universe
for giving me matches to set myself on fire
so that my flame could maybe keep you warm.


cs

At night she buries herself six feet below the ground
and she paints her face with a smile every morning.
Her mascara is waterproof and her shaking hands
buried deep inside the pockets of a beautiful coat
while she tells exciting tales of sorbet happiness.

She is a conundrum, weaves lies from silver thread
and hides behind red lipstick smiles over coffee cups.
She whispers false promises to you and herself
between Egyptian cotton sheets, skin illuminated
by the glow of the sun rising behind a high-rise.

This girl is careless but made of glass, and her eyes
catch every word you say, and carry it along, but
her words are not those you preserve in your heart.
She bursts into flames in the middle of an ocean;
she will never be anyone’s to take, or understand.

“You don’t know what it’s like
to be this empty,” he tells me
and that’s true, I don’t
but I know how it feels
to want to fill the space.

late at night, or in the early morning hours,
(they are the same, in some moments)
he tells you he likes you, wants you to be his,
i watch this scene unfold and laugh at someone's joke
like my heart isn't being torn apart
by the way he looks at you.
i pretend not to have noticed when you tell me later on,
like my eyes aren't constantly glued to his face,
and i pretend to be happy for you and i laugh,
like my heart isn't stapled to his back.
tell me, what is it like
to have breathed such significance,
to be secure in the knowledge that he is yours,
that he wants you to be his forever?
i am unfamiliar with the feeling it could provoke
to hear him say he wants you, because he has never wanted me,
and i know now he never will.
i knew this before, of course, but the unambiguity of it
now rests on my shoulders, heavy as concrete.
he likes your tan skin and your bubbly laugh,
while i cut lines into my pale white flesh and want to die.
tell me, what is it like
to have his heart at your feet - how does it look, how does it feel?
i have never been close enough to know.
tell me, what is it like
to know that in one evening, you could make him yours
without ever meaning to, or even wanting to at first?
i am not angry at you, of course, i cannot blame you
for liking him - it is easy to do, i would know -
or him for liking you - i know everyone does.
tell me, what is it like
to know someone this beautiful finds so much beauty in you;
tell me, what is it like
to feel his heart beat for you more than anyone else?
but tell me nothing more, i beg of you,
for all i ask is all i can bear; i do not want to know
more than i know my heart can take knowing.
please tell me you will treat him well,
the way i would, if only i could,
and tell me that while he is yours, you will be his.
all i can ask for, with all my love, is his happiness.


cs

she loved cold winter nights
the way that most people
love summer warmth -
i think
it made her feel warmer
from the inside when it was
cold around her, like that way
she could pretend there wasn't
ice enveloping her heart.


cs

i don't understand why you don't want to live
when i sometimes just live for you -
i know what your inside looks like,
i know the cold blue mountains and their cliffs
and i have seen you fall off them, into
that deep black sea of sadness;
i know you're forgetting how to swim.
i do not think you know me just as well -
you cannot see the way i feel most days:
like your hands are the pillars of my mind
and your words are watering the valleys of my soul.
i am afraid that you will never know
and afraid that if you do, it's not enough
to keep you from wanting to stop your heart.


cs

Like so many of us, surrounded by binaries and cold concrete,
he finds it hard to say what he feels, and I found it hard
to understand, for a while, that he loved me just as I did him,
when he never vocalised his feelings completely, and I did.
It took me some time to realise he shows them instead, and maybe
that is all the more eloquent than anything I could ever
materialise on a piece of paper filled with smeared ink.
His love manifests itself in lingering gazes and the lightest touch,
in private smiles and the softening of his eyes when I laugh.
Like a child resorts to pointing at things they cannot name,
he ends up holding close what he cannot verbalise he needs.

- “You make me happy,” I tell him. He looks vulnerable and smiles. c.s.