I think I know what the problem was, your heart is twenty meters wide.
There is the west wing, and there is the right
but you forgot about the center: the most important part
where your two halves touch, I was there but you still weren’t full enough.
She left a nickel-sized bruise
she spoke the language of little dents and drilling holes for
water to sit, you gather mosquitoes like moths to a light. I sound how
it must taste to swallow wind. Empty empty empty
while crisp as stale bread, I swam to the gods to make you mine but she left
airholes to keep breathing inside you.
Please let me plant lilies there, not roses with edged thorns. I wanted
your pain once, before I understood that a person can love
too hard or too much. You deserve to hold her memory
in some small way, even if it is just
a beautiful grave - as long as I am in your heart, I am touching hers too.

let me hold you, he said.
he wants to help me open up my lungs
but another man has his fingers
clamped around them.

and I don’t want him to let go
I don’t want to breathe
if it means being
alone.

There is a city that only I inhabit, and there is one in you, too
but that must mean houses are there
or a hotel one may stay during a visit. I guess it depends
on who you ask, if they believe in an everlasting love big enough
to fill the whole metropolis inside a person.
I did not know until I met you that cavities within me
could welcome a second resident and he would stay staring at
these organs without
thinking they look unnatural, like paintings x-rays EKG screens.
I am sorry for explaining this to everyone but I am just
so happy that my heartbeat  sounds like
a ticking clock to you – we hold bodies that tell their own time.

I understand
why some girls call their lover “Daddy”
or at least why I would.

Bare feet, rubbing against jeans

free
for yesterday’s
moon to pour itself into today

the craters like petals,
he loves me, he loves me not. It doesn’t
matter because he will protect me
anyway.

Wrap me in his veins
and we

‘ll blow as cold air swims past my lips.

I paint my nails from that feeling
in two strokes,
small, flat umbrellas for dirt.

Baby, baby,
I hear that calling now,
your hands are chilly, let me touch you

well, I guess that’s okay.
Put me on your lap and I’ll behave.

He placed me in a watering can
holy water, I said fetch me a blanket quick
fallen into warm holy water –

he said no,
that is all you. He must be my sunshine.

Please, I want to know everything about her
and why what happened
was not about me. I never did ask, but I never learned
how a person can not love someone and still
break someone else’s heart about it.
All I see is the pillow you abandoned at my house,
the warm patch of **** on its case
I put there in case she could ever lay on it and drown.
If we are marking territory, I do not know who
would win you. She had your “I love you”
before me, adolescent and as rocky as a mountain top.
But I ****** your ****. Held it up with my right
hand as if reciting some vow.
Mostly, I need to know which you preferred
whose mouth was more comfortable –
one spilling lies or one with drool, dripping ***. I
have a memory of you telling me what
her voice sounded like, but I cannot remember now.
I think that is a good sign. I think
it is beautiful that she hasn’t come chasing after you
and I hope you are not hurting for it. But
I think, too, that I have finally fallen in love with all of
what you are and not just all that I know you are.
No part of you is a phantom anymore.
I know how you sound when you want to lick another
girl’s ****, now I need to understand why.

I am small
call me baby, or love, anything but doll.

Call me angel, not honey
I am not sweet
nor could I ever stick to you.

You left me three weeks after holding my head
underwater,
shrinking more and more until
the brain could only process our memories.

Later, just the absence
of pet names that would have made sense.