i can start every sentence with
if i were beautiful . . .
and i still won't be

but if i write enough poetry
at least i'll have something beautiful
to show for myself.

How could you have ever called what we had love?
When we communicated through text
And over phone lines
Phone lines that stretched across
Boundless expanses of desert
A string
Three states long
With a tin can on either end.

So I made you feel something.
Okay.
Well let's be honest,
Love
Is not an emotion.
Love is not a mood you can be in
(Although you certainly made it seem that way).
Love is lying naked
Trapped in one another's embrace
And shutting out all the noise.

Don't tell me you loved me.
Don't tell me that's what you call whatever that was.

What it was was sickness
Manifested in two teenagers
Saying "**** the world,
I just want you."

It was just teenagers being teenagers
Loners being sick
Together.

Do not confuse,
You made me feel worlds better
But don't call it love
'Cause love is not an emotion.
Love is souls dancing
And the space between two bodies
Touching
Don't even for a second tell me that's what you think that was.
Because it couldn't have been.

I didn't fall out of love.
I figured out what love wasn't.

Madeline had visions of you falling down the stairs this afternoon. She was sipping her coffee and reading a scrap of paper that had materialized on her table from some article about a meteor somewhere and it hit her like a ton of feathers or a ton of bricks.

Doesn't really matter which.

She gasped back into the present and fell out of her chair spilling the tar-black grog she had been pawing at to the oaken hardwood and sat staring at her hands there for a minute or more.

They were pink against the tan-ish floor.

Pushing against it she regained her footing and reached for the home phone her friends chided her for owning and called me crying you won't believe what I just saw I can't believe what I just saw I think we need to call her do you think she's alright?

I had just gotten off my flight.

I don't know I said I don't know who you mean where are you are you alright I just got back into town I was going to grab my bags and catch a taxi do you need me to pick you up

She finally noticed the fallen cup.

Catching her breath he slowed her pace and started to stammer how she didn't know it didn't matter never mind I need to go and make a call I'll let you know when I get out.

I still had no idea what she was talking about.

She hung up the phone and placed another call after a half hour no six hours no six weeks of ringing someone picked up the line she had dialed and she wept and laughed and asked if everything was okay and if she needed to go and if so how far she was a primed cartridge in a loaded gun

Everything was silent and the room spun

A voice replied something inaudible and Madeline laughed and cried not cried and laughed and wondered how she could have been so rash to believe a daydream like this

She rose and gathered all her bits

And together they walked her down the hall from her sun room to the kitchen down the stairwell-

And she fell.

And for two point five one two three seconds everything stood still but her and the world stopped turning she couldn't hear her own gasp or whether she screamed or laughed or cried she just hung in the balance she hung from gods fingers she hung above a pool of sharks and a pit of lava and everything she had never done she fell far and fast and hit the ground

An no one knows whether that made a sound.