your goodbye was the sunrise,
6:07 a.m,
sprinkling your eyes with crystal shards.

"sometimes the light cuts through people
sharp and slow," you said,
but it doesn't resound with me the way
long exposure photographs
pull mist from the souls of
geniuses

my lips sometimes get dry
without the sweet and sour taste of your
affection,
and i still have to teach my tongue
how to unlearn the syllables of your
name,
but melancholy isn't a newborn baby to
cradle.
it has always been a delicate
whisper,
filling my ears like the first song a child
learns to sing

I woke up with
the taste of your lips. I don't know why---I haven't thought about
you in forever.
Honey and mint and cinnamon.
I remember when you used to haunt me---when to think you might care about me was like a
defibrillator.
The words on your tongue like a
soft subtle
shadow.
I can't stop dreaming about the people from my past who I feel
wronged by.
How did you make that list?

sometimes i am spilling gratitude out of my
eyes, and dripping it from my nose---
i have to wear lead shoes so it doesn't
float me ten feet above the ground.
other times
i am a sobbing
m e s s
with a hollowness too big within me that no words
nor art can fill.
and dark rooms become my home
and food becomes foreign.

i am slowly learning
that this is okay. that it won't always
feel right--
that sometimes you have to go through
rough patches, you have to string your body back together
and then you have to write them
down
with your blood as ink,
your mind as a sinkhole on the pavement,
just to make them real.

the tide of your voice
ebbing and flowing,         a gentle salted
sprinkle
against my ear,
a warm kiss against my cheek--
the ocean is in you.
i was born with flame in my soul,        too hot to
stomp out.
i am a burning wood oven,
afraid of being smothered.

I am like a flower that won't
Bud
And I hate everything I've ever touched
Because it did not turn to gold like my mother
Said it would

Fresh faced and dewy eyed,
With sunlight on my tongue--
I was overly fascinated with death and
Now
I don't pose ambiguous questions because
I know
That the stars are really just pits of dust that used to be
Our flesh, our strength, the thoughts that came to us
In the middle of the night,
The things we touched and the people we saw.
Our souls, buried in the twilight of the
Living--
The night sky,
Our funeral pyre.