When we have stood, cold and raw, cracked open, underneath
the waterfall of time for long enough that
it doesn't burn our skin quite so much
anymore,
I hope that you can repair the heart I
tried to break as gently as I could.

I hope that you find a girl who has always wanted to
name her baby Cody,
who can ski like a demon and
take her liquor like a cowboy and
lives for Silverados and Colorado sunsets.

I hope that when you remember my laugh,
it doesn't sound quite so pretty as hers, and that
when you scoop her up from behind,
it will feel like you are doing it for the first time.

But when she sees you cry and
says she's so grateful to have a boy who knows how,
I hope you are reminded of all the love I gave
to help you learn.
When she hugs you and thanks you for listening,
I hope you remember the time I spent listening to you,
teaching you what it means to be heard.

The way that I love you is not a fake, flimsy kind of love that
floated away when I left you--- no,
I want your girl to be all the comfort and safety and warmth and devotion that I could never be to you...

And if she isn't,
I hope that she reminds you of me
enough to make you leave before
she breaks you again.

darling, I can still chart the precise geometry of your nose,
count the number of freckles underneath your thin green eyes,
delineate the lifecycle of the stubble on your cheeks,
and all I want is to come back home to you...

aren't you going to miss
the way I could slip your belt out from under you
with my eyes still swimming in yours
while you lay down, hot and panting in the dark?

who will caress your naked chest as tenderly as I have,
slide her hand up your shirt the way that makes you shiver
and kiss you everywhere like gentle rainfall,
warm and soft and fervent like poetry?

who will bandage the fall wounds
on your torn up knees and elbows
and wash your 22-year-old body like a baby in the bathtub
when you're so drunk and tired you cannot stand?

who will stroke your hair as you sleep with one leg bent in her bed and
scratch the back of your neck and
hold you close to calm your racing heartbeat and
remember the pills you take at night and where you keep your contact lenses and all your family stories and buy you Tylenol and your favorite Gatorade when you're sick and never,
ever,
ever leave
you the way that
I did
?

that morning, I was woken up by the beating of your chest
against mine.
it was faster and that meant you were awake,
my love, my darling,
you were
awake and thinking and moving again,
no longer just your soft, comfortable, sleeping body,
and I cried in your arms because I knew that
it was time to leave home.

Tell me who this child is––
this Boy King of Cinnamon Orange Forest,
glowing rosy and regal in late October light––

christened by Pennsylvania Sun with freckles dotting
his tiny scrunched-up nose,
and streaks of shiny golden-blonde in his pin-straight russet-brown hair...

Toothless Prince of Red Cheeks and Knuckles,
with eyes pressed closed in firecracker laughter,

when did you last cry?

Can you see the black grease stains on your calloused working palms when you are 15 years older and taller and bigger and rougher and a thousand miles away from here?
Can you feel the boots on your feet and contact lenses in your eyes and splitting pain in your shins and fire in your voice and knots of glorious rage and obsession and passion in your stomach and

can you feel my fingers
in yours,
loving you –– tiny toothless sunkissed you ––
and all of you for always?

Did your heart always know who you are?

Our little collegetown is a jungle tonight,
with the deafening, staticky drone of locusts constituting
its own kind of warm gravity,

sidewalks drenched and carpeted with a rotting mess of
blood-red maple leaves, and

thousands of spiders the size of human eyes, glaring
down from the dead-center of their backlit, dew-drizzled webs.

I always thought that I'd never be loved enough.

In crafting anthologies on the angles of my favorite noses,
I pretended I didn't want someone else’s protractor on my own,
and prepared for a life sentence as the uncharted geometer,
the invisible painter, the secret poet,
the immortalizer, rather than the immortalized.

I find myself, now, to be a poem––
your poem––
etched into the curvature of your jungle-green eyes.

But walking home in our jungle tonight, I feel sick.
Your ears distort my hesitant laughter
into a dissonant, deafening euphoria, and

when I lay my head on your heated chest, I can feel the blood
gushing underneath your skin,
surging through your veins, storming, drowning
you, and I feel sick because all this love you pump for me--
all this love you are drowning in--
only rots in my guilty stomach...

When my memory is watching me
with her thousands of glaring eyes,
she will always mourn the breaking of a beautiful heart.

Before I left to walk to your music show in the courtyard,
I slipped the knife my boyfriend gave me into my dress pocket.
It was heavy enough to weigh down half the outfit, and
radiated something putrid or dissonant in that crowd
of flowers and sandals and paint and honey-chamomile
for the entire duration, but
I needed a reminder of who I am now.

Being near you at all was already a betrayal of myself
because now I guess I'm playing his type: the ******* girl--
the stereotype-smasher-badass-***** girl--
calling her a "girl" isn't even fair
because she chopped enough of her hair
to be Wyoming's worst "******" nightmare,
and she wears work boots and flannels and scars,
(and sweatshirts to cover my secret scrawny arms--)
She’s a piece-of-machinery girl,
a rachet-and-wrenched-myself-together girl,

and it took so ******* long for me to forge a metal exoskeleton
hard enough to smother this stupid gushy heart.

Because a heart only compromises the real **** I have to do in the real world--
not your fantasy world where no one has a job but
slurping your excess passion alone is somehow enough to sustain, and
the men sweep bundles of wild violets-- shooting straight out of the New York City pavement--
into their hands as gifts, and
their women smile and flip their Pantene-commercial hair in slow-motion, and
together the lovers paint poetry onto each other's chests in the dark, and
your long-expired promise of that love-- of your dream--
that you had me believing
still plunges deeper into my stomach than I ever planned it to and it feels like a white-hot
knife splitting me open from throat to bladder--

You came out to hug me when the show ended.
I walked home crying a hydraulic expulsion of the final remnants
of my old, foreclosed heart.
Then he was right there waiting for me at home, and it was so easy
to pretend.

last night I dreamt that I kissed you,
Mr. Too-Tough-to-Care,
fumbling over grease-stained t-shirts and hair
to find your tungsten-scorched neck,
slipping my slotted fingers onto your left ear
and charging my palm with your heat.

last night I dreamt that I kissed you,
Mr. Beer-is-My-Therapy,
I kissed your ***** nose, sharp and pointed,
prominent, belligerent––
a power symbol––
but it's always the first on your face to flush pink when
I talk back to you––

on saturday when I ****** up the car and nearly
gave you a heart attack, Mr. I-Ain’t-No-Little-*****, you
held my hand with the same
concealed desperation––

I know because you were looking at me
when you instinctively–– against the will of your mechanical masquerade––
forced your sweaty fingers
into the unsuspecting
pockets between mine.

Mr. Brake-Fluid-Doesn’t-Bother-Me
froze...
the honey seeping through the pores in my skin
must have been even more corrosive because,
Mr. Romance-is-for-*******,
you were paralyzed,
like you suddenly realized you’d become
the target of your own jokes––
your heart's powered by something much softer than gears––

news flash, Mr. Too-Tough-to-Care:
you're just as unsalvageable as I am.

I keep close watch of the scars on my body,
making sure that their stories don't liquidate and seep out
like blood when I'm not looking,
that they don't fade and discolor before I remember
who I am without them.
I'm afraid of letting them vanish before
you let yours vanish too.

So I stare pigment into the blisters on my right palm and I
still remember
the first time you held it,
at Six Flags when we were both high on funnelcake and the fumes of late summer mixed with bus fuel and sweat.

I do the same to my shoulder,
where yours would always be after I missed the midnight shuttle
and trudged home with a scarf up to my eyelashes
in the nearly horizontal snow.

And to my ears, because
I'd always have more work to do,
and you'd carry your stereo to my room and play
that song you stained so thoroughly with your voice that
I can't bear to listen to it
anymore.

I spend the most time re-burning the skin around my eyes
to precisely the degree that you did when you brushed the tears
from under them,
and that I did later when
I scratched away at the same flesh because you weren't there
to do it anymore.

I keep close watch of what I never thought would
turn into memories,
making sure that our story doesn't liquidate and trickle away
when I'm not looking,
that it doesn't fade and discolor before I forget
who I was when I knew you.
I'm afraid, too, that you've already long
forgotten.