flower petals are falling from my eyes
they pool around my feet
and
ice cream drips from my fingertips
it pools around my feet
and
waves crash all around me
they pool around my feet
and
i think i'm drowning

A sea of foliage girds our garden round,
But not a sea of dull unvaried green,
Sharp contrasts of all colors here are seen;
The light-green graceful tamarinds abound
Amid the mango clumps of green profound,
And palms arise, like pillars gray, between;
And o'er the quiet pools the seemuls lean,
Red—red, and startling like a trumpet's sound.
But nothing can be lovelier than the ranges
Of bamboos to the eastward, when the moon
Looks through their gaps, and the white lotus changes
Into a cup of silver. One might swoon
Drunken with beauty then, or gaze and gaze
On a primeval Eden, in amaze.

Does that book still burn on your shelf?
Or have you stuffed it under your bed,
its pages torn, still smelling of cigarette smoke
with a few coffee stains.
(Mine rests next to Tolkien).

Do you flip through it once in a while?
Noting the words you marked,
once full of meaning.
Are they empty now?
(I found empty words in my copy).

Do you take care to avoid
the covert letter under the jacket flap?
Or maybe read it, and wonder
(I regret writing it.)

i can feel you
distancing yourself from me
i can feel continental drift
i wonder, do the shoes
you wear to run from me
have holes in them?
or do you go barefoot
careful not to make a sound
in your retreat. "cover your tracks & don't look back" i imagine
your demons whisper daily
as you are growing fond of me
i wonder if your heart puts up a fight when you want to see me
or if it's a massacre
& the demons dance
on dreams you have
of us holding hands
do you wander to your car
only to find yourself back in bed?
do you put your makeup on
just to take if off again?  
is your imagination of me
a graveyard, or a pair of open arms
that are inches away
but just out of reach?
you see, what i've been so afraid
to tell you for so long,
why i feign sometimes
before speaking
careful not to tell you
all my unspoken promises,
it has to do with the night you had your head on my chest and confessed you never thought my heart
could beat like hummingbird wings:
i apologize for my silence
what i've been trying to say
is that my heart hasn't slowed down
since the day we drank coffee together
continents apart

I appreciate you for kissing me when no one else would & holding my hand no matter how cold it was;
& for always remembering that i'm more delicate than your lips & this kind of love can only happen once;
& the fact that I always loved you more, but you somehow always showed me more love;
& no matter how angry I made you, you always forgave me because you knew that the ocean would sink itself if it could;
& for always crawling past the bad times, because you knew how beautiful the good times were; because you knew how beautiful we were.

If you ever read this I want you to know:
The one thing I loved more than your smile was the way you smiled at me;
& the reason I couldn't love you any harder was because I put all of my love into writing about you, not actually giving that love to you;
& I forgive you for giving up on me, I would have given up on a fully lit moon also;  i'm sorry I couldn't illuminate the night sky every night for you;
& all of the reasons I couldn't kiss you as hard as I wanted to were all the same reasons why I want to die with you in my arms;
& the way you used to look at me felt like skydiving with no parachute on, or being the last one standing in a game of dodgeball, or sinking to the bottom of a bathtub that's filled with your love & affection, or running a marathon while running on no hours of sleep, or seeing the moon for the first time, or realizing that the love we had is more meaningful than any high paying dead-end job, or traveling the world, or feeling something for somebody they said was an impossible feeling.

If you ever read this I want you to know, thank you, for everything.