Someone save me from
Falling into the rhythm
Because surely
I will lose myself in it

The ones that were left behind
Began to kick at my shins
And they bled and bruised blue
But all that fell were tears
And my apologies

Forgive me, I've been a stranger
But deep down I've drowned
And coming up for air is a hassle
But I'm still watching from afar

Please wait for me
Please don't look at me like that
Please hear me when I say these
Two words, tumbling out like
******* birds, thirsty for the taste
Of cotton candy clouds

And please accept me,
Those not-so-forgotten friends of mine

I gave you a warm meal
   You called me nice
I gave you a roof for the night
   You called me kind
I gave you a bed and a fleece blanket
   You called me compassionate
I gave you a set of clean clothes
   You called me thoughtful
I gave you money for necessities
   You called me generous

You said thank you
I called you a saint

I dreamed that
I was my own god,
that I had more control over myself
than you, but
2. I must have dreamed that
I was filled with air
and tied to a string
because when I woke up that morning in October
all I wanted was to get high
and hammered as hell, so
3. like Sean Thomas said,
I must have dreamed I was a nail.
4. I must’ve dreamed that I was deathly ill
because I wanted your touch more than anything
but woke up completely isolated from you,
and reacquaintance comes at a great cost;
I really shouldn’t be feeling
as lost as I do when out of the blue
you show up to my house at 1:30 a.m.
5. I’m sorry.
The few hours between kissing another man
and my decision not to tell you,
to leave you instead,
haunts me, but
6. I dreamed that he was the one holding me
for weeks on end
for weeks on end
for weeks on end
I did not say a word.
7. I dreamed I had a crush on him,
but I’m fairly certain I woke up
falling in love.

(I wrote this almost a year ago, and I just found it.)

You tell me
that you love me.
I’m not sure
as to whether I should say,
"I love you too,"
or “I know.”
Because I spent my whole childhood
believing in second chances
but I’ve also spent my life
believing that I never deserved them.
That praise was something
to which I would never be entitled.
That other peoples’
time
effort
company
were things I would never
be truly worthy of,
and even calories
were a foreign substance
that I would never deserve.
I have mastered the art
of filling myself
with relics of isolation
and the hopes that nobody
will get too close,
for I will surely drown them.
Suffocate them.
I can not let myself think
that you might actually care about me,
I can not let myself believe
that I am worth what you say I am,
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry that you got
stuck with me,
and that you allowed yourself
to feel something more for me
than I ever could for myself,
I’m sorry that I dream of you now
and that your name is always
in my thoughts and on my lips,
it is addictive in its toxicity.
For I fear that if I go too long
without saying it,
that it will disappear.
But at the same time
I feel as thought I say it
too often,
but I guess the phrase
"too often"
needs perspective.
I can not let myself believe
that this does not come
with a punchline,
that you do not come with
an ulterior motive,
that the beat my heart skips
and the catch in my breath
are not the product of a joke.
Because my thoughts are screaming
inside of my mind louder than my voice
could ever tell you that I love you too,
and the shrieking and shuddering sobs
that escape my lips
as blood trails like springwater
down my arms
are so quiet, I am amazed the world
cannot hear.
I am amazed that my virtually nonexistent voice
does not ring in the ears
of anybody who stops to listen
but simultaneously,
I am glad.
Glad that nobody can take
the solidity of mental illness in love
away from me.

"You don’t go to Denny’s.
You end up at Denny’s
when it’s 3 in the morning and
you’ve lost control of your life.”
Sigh.
*******.
Well, it is the middle of the night,
and I am sitting in a booth
over a cup of coffee that tastes like regret,
but why am I here?
I’m sorry.
I needed to get away.
I needed to get away
from the way your voice
ticks in the back of my mind,
I raise the mug to my lips and pretend
that the coffee trailing down my throat
is still your promise,
still warm, and tinted with sugar.
I needed to get away
from the words you sent on my phone screen
swimming back and forth across my eyes,
I’ve dreamed about you so often
that your smile is burned into
the inside of my eyelids.
I’ve made it a game to see
how long I can go without blinking.
because while I don’t want to see a world
where you and I don’t fit together,
waking up from a world where we do
is so much worse.

(Summer 2014.)

I always thought I knew what love was.
Then I met you.
You could reach places of my soul
that even I didn’t know existed,
each smile was another reason to live,
Every time you laughed
I fell more in love.
every time I looked into your coke-and-whiskey eyes
each pant after a kiss carried a thousand poems
about those eyes in it.
You gazed at me like an artist
would admire Van Gogh,
you held me like I was the answer
and for a while, I thought I was, with
Your fingers pressing into my hips
in a way that I later found out
was to intercept the thought of your hands
on her hips.
You played me
like I was the last cello on earth-
but not in a good way.
And I know it’s pathetic,
but you’re the heaven
and the earth to me,
because you were the only person
that could make me smile the way you did.
It was supposed to be just ***,
but I’m in love with you-
present tense.
I want to lay in bed with you
under sparkling blue Christmas lights
strewn out across my walls like everything
I never thought I could say
but found the opportunity to,
I want to kiss your scars,
I want to fix your broken hearts with
duct tape and a song,
and I want to admire every inch of your body
because it’s perfect,
even if you don’t think so.
I want to do things to you
that I’ll never have the opportunity to do again,
because while everything about you
wrecks everything about me
in what I thought was
the best possible way,
I turned out to be a rebound.
A substitute
for a girl who gave you a murky puddle
just big enough to catch the reflection
of you two hand in hand,
while you drowned me in the clearest ocean
I could have given you.

They say that human eyes
can hold galaxies,
constellations.
Maybe that explains why
every time I look into yours,
I feel infinite.
Like there’s no star
I couldn’t reach.