come to the river of your longing,
put your grief down next to mine.
i will show you how i can bleed,
let time play on your chest like
the hands of a lover.
i will pull back the covers of the sky,
i will pull my heart back from the Dark,
i will pick up your pieces and bring them home.

Your lips-
The first disaster.
A strange sea of intense blue,
Dangerous and horrifying like love.
Our bodies walk untouched by the light,
Shadows supreme and arrogant.
My love is not cruel-
That does not mean it is kind.
That look is breaking the ground underneath me,
The way an earthquake does when two strangers meet.
The roots spread and break through every goodbye planted
Inside of me.
We are trying to see who can hurt worse.
The tide came in while my eyes were closed,
I am thrown headfirst against the rocks.
All this time,
The world was spinning in circles.
The wind pushes and pulls us away.
All of the places I can't dream of going  
Have my name taped to the mailbox.
You love out of a suitcase, always
Ready to pack up and leave.
Holding faith that one of these people
You let touch you with the lights off
Will be more than just a past-lover.
And the phone rings,
Like a call back from the darkness,
"I love even the parts of you that have to go home."

I liked to be in Hell, and
I liked to be there alone.
Violence tangled in this tissue,
This shame,
I am cut open,
A faithful mutilation with scars that
Read like atonement.
This Rage is violent and mine-
The wrong kind of ugly, I know.
The living body of a survivor
Wakes up each morning in a grave.  
I have always carried my love for this world,
Carried my horrible reverence for this world,
This world is sick like a knife.
I can feel eternity pressing against my throat.
There is Nothing,
It comes to devour from the inside.
The length of silence swells                
like a syndicate of ants.
In Hell we are alone.
What can you do besides hold your hand out to the dark?

love rains from my mouth,
it drips down the front of my t shirt.
i am pouring,
i overflow.
with the lightning and thunder,
with a heart drumming
the beat of a hummingbirds wings-
briefly, breathlessly.
existing on the brink of tragedy;
what was it all for?
if there is comfort it is one thing,
you are here.
if there is fear it is another,
i am here, too.
i give up, i give in,
i won’t fight any more.
there is too much hurt here
but still, i am giving you this,
the right hand and the wrong one.
trusting that you will take both and hold them
to your chest, to your own
weathered heart.
you hurricane, you fire raging,  
i have been looking for you in every broken piece.
if it was all meant for this,
all meant to bring me here,
i would understand.
i would understand.

To tell the truth about myself,
A confession to my untidy spirit.
Blood dries under nails,
I'm not sure which me it belongs to.
Once, I had a man tell me,
"Forgiveness looks beautiful on you."
I unhook my ribs
And hang my lungs on a coatrack,
I do it for love,
For love I abandon my self.
A soul stretching like one uninterrupted wound,
Climbing up the length of my spine.
Forgiveness looks like an accident,
Spilled on the pavement,
Reflecting the light.
I have never learned how to decay gracefully.
An affinity for crisis,
An empathy that runs deeper than dreams
And thicker than blood,
You couldn't wash me from your memories if you tried.
All the ways one heart can bruise,
Love in itself is a sort of solitude, you said.
The timid ghost of myself
Casted here at my feet,
I am looking at myself only to be seen.
How cruel a forgiveness which
Doesn't know when to trust itself.
To tell the truth about myself,
To be the sun instead of light emitting from a dead star,
Would be an admittance that even God isn't ready to hear.

It's a funny thing to lay next to someone, to sleep with them in a bed.
I can start off close and drift away in the summer heat, morning  brandishing my dreams until it rattles me awake, gasping for sunlight. I can account for the missing space between our bodies, getting drunk on the warmth of his skin and waking tangled up in his curly hair. I can count the stars and talk to the moon while I trace my name into his palm with a finger, listening to the sound of his even breathing and the steady drum of his heartbeat. The world is quiet when my lover is asleep, my heart takes a deep breath and the soul pauses. I exhale all of the days worries in the middle of the night when he takes my hand and pulls me closer to him. In the spring time, we wake up further apart than we are used to, and my sleepy head turns to face him, and it's like waking up all over again. That moment where we are remembering the bed, the person in it, coming back to life, and he runs his hand down my back and kisses my forehead. "I've missed you," every morning, like a daily prayer for our survival, for another day of bliss.

My grief and I are well-acquainted.
Two strangers sharing the same body.
How else to explain grief but as a mirror?
The grief and my body.
The grief or my body,
It is my grief every time.
I torture it,
I lay in it,
I set it on fire.
A still burning star,
A still living thing,
A still life of my first night alone.
The room is still, too.
It does not breathe
It does not turn over, reach for my hand,
Cough, or flutter its eyelids open onto my face.
It is just a room with two bodies.
I hold my grief,
I do.
I hold it until it stops bleeding,
Until it too is a lifeless thing,
I hold it.
How many more times can I say I miss you
without flinching?
How do you write about what it should've been without sounding like an *******?
Without losing yourself in the fantasy?
Like a hymn,
I give my grief to God but it doesn't go anywhere.
This is where the poet in me stops breathing,
And it hurts,
It hurts,
It hurts to breathe.
Pulsating through my body like adrenaline,
Fueling these poems with empty traces of your name.
The grief opens my mouth and says your name.
Over and over,
Chanting pleas of worship.
How are you still standing?
The grief knocks me over,
Like mid-day waves against the rocks,
And now I am a hollow body of devotion,
I tend to my grief like a garden
On my hands and knees,
and watch it
Grow into weeds.
At least there is life here somewhere.
I lay in my grief.
Two bodies laying in the dirt.
How can you just stand there and watch me die?