April of last year I counted in the cigarettes I watched try to pour the light back into your eyes.

The parallel of your embers against the dulled papers of mine,
both poignant with the bitterness emanating from our little metaphors.

We never promised to be careful and no strings attached makes the tying threads easy to find.

The words I never said left paper cuts on my tongue,
replacing where your lips used to be.

It's lucky that my thoughts move too fast for your feel to follow me.

Even luckier still that the only thing left is a tattoo of that cigarette where your mouth used to be.

I wish I could tell you it was a Thursday,
Maybe give the beginning of our extra load a concrete date.
But I can't tell you it was Thursday and I
Can't tell you it wasn't.
Sometimes I'm glad the devil is in the details
Because then with me he'll never be found.

It’s been highlighted, underlined, written on the side of my shoe: do not awaken love until it so desires.
It is to love then, not to me or to you, that I owe an apology
Because when they told me love hurts— I invited it to knock me down.

I think you try to talk to me because I knew you best and you like that,
But every time I offered you a tissue you took it as a chance to cut into mine,
And I let you to chip away a shade of my hue with every slice,
Changing the gradient and adding cracks to the contour of my soul.

Every time I slid my skin off for you it was under artificial light,
Painting the yellow pigment of my skin shades of black and blue instead of allowing me to stay golden because shiny wasn’t the right color,
You didn’t need to see your reflection the truth wasn’t interesting to you.

You didn’t take my honor you ignored its existence,
I made love to you without making you love me,
That’s why it’s so funny that now you don’t play hard to get,
you play hard to get rid of.

Realizing I deserved better changed everything,
You had nothing to offer but your own confusion and version of the world,
But I have my own now,
And I’ve colored it to be absent of your blacks and blues.

people should come with sodium labels
so we can know ahead of time- how much salt one carries to throw in our wounds.
how much of the pounds they count- have the potential
to become water weight from caused tears.

maybe if people came with a nutritional warning
we could better see who had the propensity to be hazardous to our health.

You are the scar in the form of a freckle
on my left pinkie,
the one that tells me people don't last forever but marks do.

How ironic that the symbolism of a mis-colored dot
of skin should be the reminder that you are now out of place in my world,
the wrong color, where your pigment discolored mine.

They tell me I wore my heart on my sleeve
but that would imply it's place on my person,
when the place it currently resides is between your fist.

You used to tell me your knuckles were swollen because you were beaten a time or two,
but really the pink puckers show more of your own fights and the matching
color of someone else's scar tissue.

I was told I deserved better than smoke filled hands
but I'm pretty sure what I really deserve is more than alcoholic lips.

They tell me if you have to ask if a story is true, its not.

I'm guessing in terms of a love tale, the same would apply to me and you.

I'm not a person to you,
my subtleties are lost in a constellation of tally marks,
the strikes against me in your mental map of our universe.

My buttons can’t be hidden from you you’re the one
who tied them so loosely to the cuffs of my sleeves
and the bulk of my 20 cent words form the change in the linings of your pockets,
where my hands used to be.

The pads of your fingers find the freckles on the nape of my neck but the worn feeling of you thumb prints against my pulse reminds me
the pigmentation is no longer cute to you
just another imperfection for the list..

which is running through the front of my brain
like your hands used to run through the creases
of my smile.

It’s the poetry to the empty screen your face used to fill
that reminds me some pills are better off untaken,
and that sometimes empty yellow bottles are filled with the hope that is left behind by the promise
that sickness requires it to be refilled again.