My thighs are bruised from your fingertips
Which have never actually touched my skin
But I grip my own cold body in the agony of your absence

And it's less of an absence and more of a never-presence
Like the school board that hasn't yet marked
The student who moved in late summer
So the teacher calls their name to an empty seat
Until they find out they were never coming in the first place

In ancient Greece they would build alters to worship the gods
Lay down offerings of bled goats and burning wool
And hope their fortune runs true

And while this is no Greece
I'd build an alter for you
Worship like a dog at your shrine and hope you're listening

And if you leave I wait like Argos
No strength to move on but all the love in the world
Not moving until you return and my starving bones can waste away at last

Angels singing could not have sounded better
Than the first time I said your name to myself
Hopelessly in love and wishing to breathe that name
Against
Your lips

You may hate it, but I’ve never heard a name
I want to say
As much
As yours

It starts as a flutter in my chest
Rushing up my throat and pouring from my mouth
Like fog spilling over
A hill
At dawn

Sugar coated words whispered
Over electronic meetings
The morning birds join me
In my
Song

Audrey
Faith
McKee

It's elementary, my dear
This bittersweet affection that I feel
From one boy to the next I grew
Ladder rungs of broken hearts

First grade
Blonde hair and disarming smile
Recess games and hallway passes
A note in a diary and minutes spent giggling
Never talking, always watching

Fourth grade
Glasses frame of brown hair and thin shoulders
Curious enigma to come and go
A bit more literate diary entrees
One year of crossed legs and shy smiles

Fifth grade
A growing tree of lean muscle and blue eyes
Short brown hair and a charming grin
Side by side on a rubber track
Gray skies and sweet goodbyes
A bright dance floor and a shattered heart
Miserable nights and heartbreak songs

Seventh grade
Long dark hair and chocolate eyes
This spring has brought a strange surprise
Wiry muscle and soft cheeks
Once admired, then adored
An ongoing thrum of sweet affection
Sidelong glances and gym class stares
New discoveries and quiet realization
Girl can love girl

Tenth grade
A firecracker packed with mysterious boys
And an enigmatic girl
A bomb in the summer sky
Spelling new names, new faces, new hearts
A whisper of 'I love you' at long last returned
Names carved on my ribs and pulling my lips
A tightened chest never felt so good

I’m drowning
The distance between us is the depth of an ocean
And I’m sinking deeper in the darkness
I can’t breath
You’re like the lighthouse calling me home
But for the life of me I can’t pull myself to shore
I want you
You’re the rope holding me to the dock
And I’m clinging to the cord
I need you
You’re the shining star in my dark sky
Something to save me from my darkness

You’re drowning
There are anchors tied to your limbs
Dragging you deeper and deeper
You can’t breath
You have your own demons
I’m struggling to fight them but it’s an army of two
You want me
There’s a sickness in your chest
Caving in your ribs until there’s nothing left
You need me
Their words add more weight to your ankles
You can’t find the air or the light

We’re drowning*

But maybe together we can learn to swim

It's not simple
It's rusted nails breaking skin
Lightning flashes in a hurricane
The crack of a body hitting the pavement

It's the pinch of nails in your palms
The tremble of your legs when you think they're watching
The ache in your chest when your binding is too tight
But not tight enough

It's not a stormcloud, it's a typhoon
It's not a discomfort, it's torment
Its the steel beams in your chest snapping under pressure
Your skeleton crumbling so maybe your chest will be flat then

But all those rusted nails and steel beams
Heated by the fire and fury of passion
Remold into something new

Someone who can stand a bit straighter
Speak louder
Tip their chin up
And show the world who they are
Who he is.

Dysphoria is a skyscraper crumbling to ash
But it's also scraps of wreckage
Reminded into a safe haven
A place of rest
A place of comfort

I've never been religious
But if anything were to convert me
I think it would be you

I've always trusted Mother Nature
To make volcanos and waterfalls
Great Plains and temperate forests
But I'm not sure if she could create
Such perfection as you

An entire galaxy was pulled into your body
Swelling and expanding
New memories are the birth of new stars
Every scrape and bruise creates cosmic wonders

The Caribbean has nothing on your eyes
Swirling fairy pools that I would not mind drowning in
At all
In fact
I think I'm already sinking

Your body was carved by rivers thundering through a canyon
Carving your every edge and curve
A river still running through your veins

You're a perfect constellation of skin and bone
A forest of beauty lit by your flaming heart
I don't know
If nature could create that
So if there is a god
Thank you

There’s something in my chest
Growing, swelling
A disease manifesting in my heart
It latches to my nerves and infects my brain
It’s love

It overflows from my heart
Oozing through my ribs like a thick river
Of butterflies and tired words
Remembered laughs and the sound of your voice

But lately it’s a symphony of voices
A theatre full of musicians playing my heartstrings
You’re a musician baby, and so are they

I’m sick
Infected with too much love for too many people
It’s a heart transplant
But they don’t take my old heart out first
Just add more and more until they spill from my ribs
Filling every corner of me until I crack

But baby I love it

He writes boy on his leg
Etching the letters the world won't understand
Wishing the felt tip pen could
Break the gravestones on his chest
And fill the valley between his legs

He writes boy on his leg
It's a word kept secret in fear
He's a mustang learning his legs
And the world is a pack of vicious wolves
They don't know what to call him
Only he does

He writes boy on his leg
Takes a picture and sends it to the one he knows understands
The flash against his pale skin stark and bright
Like sleepy eyes against fresh snow

He writes boy on his skin
Because he can't write it anywhere else

The ocean swells were never mocked
For their size or intensity
So maybe inside you is just an ocean
At high tide

Your skin tastes of sea salt
Your eyes the color of tide pools
But when you look at yourself
All you see is pain

Your mind sends messages to the hand with the knife
Wishing that instead of your wrists
You were cutting the fat

I'm a thousand miles away
But I see you as if you were before me
Blue pool eyes and high tide waist
An ocean of warmth to welcome me
With lapping waves and swirling currents

In the mirror you see a murky puddle
No shape or satisfaction
Thunderstorms do nothing to ease your misery
But only swell the pain

But what I see is a blue ocean
Carving love into the sand
When I reach out my hands
The water is warm to touch
I have never seen water
So beautiful

White lines on your wrists like lightning scars
The electricity sparking through your veins
Igniting a forest fire on your tongue and infernos in your chest.

You will not submit to them
You are not a controlled flame
There are scars on your wrists and that storm will thunder in your throat

Your blood is on fire and its burning through your skin
You cannot hide in the shadows for you are glowing
Come out and show them who you can be

You have the soul of a lion
Buried deep beneath lessons
Of inferiority and knowing your place
They've told you where you belong
How you're meant to be
But they're wrong

Deep inside you is a predator
Itching for you to see
See the fire in your eyes
Or feel the sharpness of your teeth and tongue
You may not have the mane you want
But you have a mane of fire
Burning from your soul
Pushing free from your skin

No man can stand a lion
You are more powerful than your body
More important than their words
You're the king of the Savannah
And the king of your heart
All you need to do
Is find your roar

Metaphors for blue eyes
There's one for every shade of blue
A rainbow of silken language meant to charm
They're as common as the color itself
But recently I've come to realize
Why

Her eyes
Dark, under curling lashes and golden hair
Like crystals flashing from the rough
Dream-catching sunbeams and sparkling
Like the summer sun on a warm pool
A medley of sapphires and diamonds
That I wouldn't trade for the world

His eyes
Fairy pools of magic wonder
The not-so-secret glimmer of bright water
An enchanted river whose glow
Is the bright warmth of an autumn day
Crystalline water that welcomed my touch
The still surface broken when he laughs

Your lips are a gateway to a realm unmatched by any heaven
A twisting cavern of stalactites through which your voice echoes
Like the thundering of a summer storm
Or the song of a morning jay

Your lips may seem small but really they are the curve of a how
Ready to fire flaming arrows of love and desire through my chest
The flames kindled by words that drip from your tongue like swirling magma

Your mouth is a cavern carved by nature into your bone
To which my tongue is an eager explorer
And though you think that one stalactite is out of place
Really it gleams like all the rest

Your mouth is a weapon of emotion
Your voice a churning reservoir of thoughts just waiting for the tide to rise
Tide pools on your tongue collect the ideas that stir inside you
Within your lips is a hidden oasis
It just might take a few hallucinations to discover

Muse
Inspiration, motivation
The will to make art
Whether bending colors to my will
Or carving a painting out of words
The muse is the color in my brain
The hand that guides mine across the canvas

I've lost my muse
I've lost the will to try
To try to make art or weave silk from words
And when I'm longing for it to return
You're there like a desert oasis
When I think of muse
I think of ideas
Of the will to write and create

When I think of you as my muse
I feel like Pablo Picasso
Painting perfect figured from oil colors
Shaping beauty with my hands
Until the words take your figure
Arching across the page like the curve of your body
And painting pictures if your beauty

You are an idea so abstract
I could have never created you
But I'm honored
To create from you

I
When I look for inspiration
I dig through bedrock of heartbreak poems
So you but so not us

II
You are my inspiration
Not enough to put in words but too much to say
I fall asleep with poem scraps floating in my empty skull
As if all I could ever know was words for you

III
Sometimes my mouth gets tired of smiling
The things I don't tell you hang as deadweight on each of my ribs
Even your dove-wing voice can't pull me
From the black sea I lurk in
But you smile for me anyway

IV
Mid afternoon and I'm sleeping with the light on
You're a brewing thunderstorm that promises
Never to drought my dusty ribs

V
Late night and I'm not a poet
But you're the shallow river
Where I can sit naked and you won't hurt me
Your waters are warm and make me want to write
I'm not a poet but you're poetry

Realizing I was in love was like realizing Santa didn't exist
I don't know when or how it happened
There was no jolt or feeling of my childhood crumbling around me
I realized years later that the presents under the tree were from my parents
And realized months after our meeting
I wasn't making myself say I love you

Realizing I was in love was like walking into a pool and finding the water warm
I was expecting a cold shock and minutes wasted getting used to the feeling
Forcing myself to go under
But falling in love wasn't forced but welcome
You were the tide over my head I couldn't wait to explore
Hurrying to wade in instead of taking the smallest of steps

I wasn't dragged into loving you any more than I'm dragged out of bed on Christmas morning
Or into a warm pool in the summer sun
You were a welcome feeling
And it doesn't hurt to say I love you

Love can be boiled down to science
A solution of chemicals colliding to form feeling
Oxytocin, testosterone, endorphins
It’s something you can learn
But it’s not

No one can learn the way you smile
Without seeing it for themselves
No one can memorize the curves of your body  
Or how they feel under my touch
The fluttering in my chest when you laugh
Is not something that can be injected
Your lips against mine
Not something to be sold on dark streets

You’re fireworks exploding in my rib cage
Setting fire to my bloodstream like it were gasoline
And I have no regrets for that
And that’s not something
That can be formulated
Calculated
Or taught
By anyone other than you and me

Extra lessons after school
Explaining how you are not yourself
Such small words used so simply
Cut like knives through your chest
'She'

Paraphrasing arguments
Summarizing discipline
Faceless family with too much on their own plate to understand
Why you don't like what's on yours
'She'

Tightness in your chest not because your binding is too small
But because it isn't
The name of a state has never hurt so much
'She'

You look in the mirror and grimace
Shower so fast you don't have to see yourself
Roll their words in your mind until you're leaning over the toilet
'She'

Humming summer days fade into early autumn nights
Long days enforce what they have already told you
Dress code laws repeated by tongue
And hasty dressing in changing rooms
Hoping they won't notice you
'She'

But you are an active volcano
There are wolves in your chest and lions in your brain
And they can't change you
You get home and look in the mirror and sign into skype
A simple word that only drops one letter
Has never had so much power

He.

Your fingers pull at shower-soft hair
Getting longer but not too long
Your eyes are dry but so is your tongue
Because you can’t find it in you to cry

Your chest is tight but it’s not the shirt you wear
It’s your ribs closing in on your lungs.
Your insides are crushed beneath the weight of their words
Pronouns buried like landmines beneath your skin
There’s a sickness inside you
Gnawing on your bones
Black tar sticky in your stomach
A violence pressing against your organs

You’ll feel better when you’ve changed your body
When your voice is deep and there’s hair on your jaw
You can take your shirt off at the beach
And flirt with girls at the coffee shop

Until then there’s no one who can understand
No one to get why you stand before the mirror
Running your hands over your flattened chest
Or practice walking like there’s something between your legs

No one asks why you’re not happy with cancer
Because no one is happy with cancer
But no one understands that your dysphoria
Is a sickness
And its terminal

Sometimes I wonder if I love you
I've come to doubt myself so much over the years
Sometimes I wish I could enter the body of a married man and feel what love feels like
So I know for sure
But then I see your glacier eyes
And realize I can't stop laughing before you do
Sometimes I realize there's no need to doubt
My love for you

Sometimes you can't say I love you back
That used to scare me
But you told me you always know you do
Sometimes I'm still scared
But I believe you

Sometimes you feel awful
And I know if I could swim the ocean
For just the chance to sit by your bed
I know that your hand in my hair would replace
The cold of the waves
And the pain in my heart

Sometimes I fall asleep before the tears dry on my pillow
Sometimes I'm awake long after
But no matter what I know I have you in the morning
Your glacier eyes and ringing laugh
Sometimes I doubt myself
And always you help me stop

When I met you, I had no idea you'd teach me more than any classroom has
I didn't know that a year from then I'd be so deep in love I can't see the surface anymore
But instead of water in my lungs, it's butterflies.

I didn't know there was more to existing than hating my body
Didn't know that happiness doesn't have to be at the end of the road, but on the way
I thought that laughing into a mirror was saved for the movies

You taught me that a thousand miles means nothing
When the call quality increases and I can see every shade of blue in your eyes
And watch your cheeks crease as you laugh

A year ago I went through different self hate like phases of the moon
Wishing I could eclipse the mirror and take away this awful image
Too feminine, too masculine, too not-me and too outcast
Then you told me if I wanted to be your boyfriend all I had to do was ask

I don't think you know how much you've done for me
I never tell you because it's never the right time but
When you're reading this now I want you to know you're the reason my moon's always full
Your eyes are like a summer that only blooms for me and I want to bloom just for you too

You taught me how to try and understand things I have never felt
You taught me the bad things and I try to show you the good
You taught me that happiness can be as simple as someone else's smile

Sometimes I think that everything I do is secretly hurting you
That I mess up and drag you down but
Then you whisper I love you into the gap in a conversation and I remember
How it feels to be happy again

To the boy who taught me everything
I love you

They whisper about you
Like the wind whispers in the leaves
But instead of a calm summer breeze
It's a lightning storm of bitter words

Your mother calls you her son
And while that might have been solace once
Now it's a mask you hide behind
You are her son
But you're also her daughter

Your friends become a pack of jackals
Just when you need them most
Turning their backs with glittering eyes
Their tongues stained with lies

'She' is such an enigmatic word
It could mean anyone
But you think of the witch that hurt you
Will you ever not see her in your mind?
What was once love has soured
Because of her

Tu ne s'aime pas
You don't love her
You did
But you've found your freedom

The sliver of light in a dark cave
The wanton brush of an angel's wing
A savior to pull you from this abyss
Maybe I can be that savior

Tu ne s'aime pas

A thousand miles
Separated by screen and wire
Bringing two worlds together for such short hours

You laugh and smile until I grow restless
Shifting between you and him
Worrying about what he thinks
Until finally I find the courage
To tell you I'm going

Your smile fades when I say his name
Your lips an understanding line as you agree
He's been waiting for me, yes
But so have you

I'm sorry I don't know how to manage time
I want you to know he does the same things
The thin-lipped nod
The grudging I love you
The saddened blue eyes as I return to you

But I'm tired
Tired of endless calls and worries
Last minute change of plans
And the looks on your faces when I leave
You know I'll call you again
But you don't know why I have to ever stop

White moon screen
Guiding light to insomniac wolves
Struggling to close their eyes  
So when I howl at this full moon
Will you sing with me
And let your voice cry to the heavens
Spill out your tears into Ariel font
Lone wolves send bleeding messages
The most lost write the sweetest songs

Just get over it
That's what they all say
You have a good life
You aren't depressed, you're just whiny

Oh, that's right
It's in the past
Because the gleaming eyes of a too-old man
Dark rooms out of the family's sight
The way you can't live without those sick memories
It's all in the past, right?

You were a young saint
A little boy with nothing to lose
But his too-big hands and his too-wide smile
Ripped your white angel wings from your back
And pressed your fragile body
Ever harder to the mattress

It's been almost a decade but you don't forget
Like the way America has not forgotten
September 11th
They remember 2500 lost lives
But you're not allowed to mourn your own?

"They" is just another pronoun
But you know exactly who I mean
The bitter faces that turned away from you
Accusations of lies on their tongue
When all you needed was someone to be there

Forget them
You've grown and changed and you are not one of them
They need to get the **** over it
Not you
You're strong
You're unique

You're alive

Your body
Is a creation of the galaxies
A coming together of milky ways and solar flares

When I first saw you, I was stunned
At the sheer amount of stardust it would take
To make something that beautiful

Your body
Is a glass case
Struggling to hold rivers in your veins
Herds of wild horses in your chest
The monarch migration in your stomach

Slowly you are cracking
The glass relenting to the spirit it cannot hold
But when it breaks you will not hurt
You will be free

You said you're not a writer
But I think you're wrong
For when you touch me I feel your soul
You write poems on my skin with your lips
And sonnets with your fingertips
And if your heart poured forth ink
I'd be black with your love