***** girl problems.
Any text on a t-shirt?
Highlighter for ****.

I was going to write you something
that embodied our love, some
infinitesimal prose about
your name click-clacking off of
my tongue or your eyes
when you're smiling.

I was going to answer all of
the questions that are silently ticking
inside your mind and scrawl
perfect prepositions across the page
so that your hands might
falter as they traced the corners.

I wanted to tell you about
the tug of your presence or
the way that your fingerprints
feel against mine,

but I'm writing this instead,
listing off the beauty that I feel
seeping into my skin and
it doesn't really make sense
but that's just the way it falls
onto the paper, bit by bit.
sad things, serenade me.

I'm only romanticizing
the madness of it all.
I never asked to be
a ******* poet.

Back then nothing truly mattered
because we were sitting on cloud nine
years old
and stepping on a sidewalk crack could break an elephant's back
but you stepped anyway
because from way up there on your cloud
elephants were like ants
and we stepped on those too
we were big fans of stepping on things
we stepped on twigs on mud on trees on dirt on carpet on sidewalk cracks on ants
we were too busy stepping to realize that soon
we would become the ones being stepped on.
Because at three feet tall we were so busy playing with the world at out feet
we didn't realize there were worlds worlds above us.
because we were sitting on cloud nine years old
stepping on ants and sidewalk cracks
never bothering
to look  up.

I walk down the street
and there is just this radiating *** appeal
in everything I could possibly do—
even in the way the rubber on my shoes
grips the hot cement sidewalks.
(I realize that may not sound too ****—
at all;
But I’m confident that in this moment
someone is drooling over that step.)
Unmistakable swagger.
A few more moments of this
untouchable cool
& Morgan Freeman will be narrating
my every thought and movement.*

At least
that’s the way you make me feel.

How dare you.

You have the audacity to become
something so earmarked in my
little,
inconsequential,
twentysomething life.

You have the guts
to learn all of those
hidden quirks.
The same ones I relentlessly
and rightfully
keep to myself.

You have the nerve
to become the reason
why I smile for days,
go to bed alone
(but beaming)
& wake up with a larger reason
to grab life by its
big
metaphorical
*****
until it sees things my way.  

& I’m aware that
“*****” may not be the most
poetic of terms—
but the last time I checked,
poetry didn’t have
a **** definition

The last time I checked—
neither do we.

So how dare you
build me up into the only person
I can stand to be,
with only the promise
of an impending expiration date?

Then again,
there is something strangely
haunting
& remarkable
revolving around
the anticipation of that sort of heartache.