A cigarette after ***
  gets old
when it's the only thing
  burning
in your world.

When Netflix feels like
  family,
you wonder where
  everyone went.

******* feels like
  a cry for help--
So help you God.

Missing your home
  is second
to missing who
  you once were.

Eastern philosophy,
Karl Marx, Rawls--
We don't know
  any ******* thing,
really.

Pretending to be more.
Pretending to be smarter
than we really are.

May holes in our sides
let others see
that we're beating, too--
just not as ferociously
or as honestly.

May we vanish
into the darkness
that best suits us.

If the light is our night,
may we follow it.
Follow it...
Follow it...
Rebel from our frame.

May God grant us
to be more
than losers.

she’s the girl who will remember everything. from your birthday, to the story behind that scar on your left arm, to the number of freckles on your body.

she will love every inch of your body and your soul and even the heart you didn’t know you had.

she will take in everything you have to offer and give you back so much more. so much, that you won’t even know what to do with it.

she will open up the world for you. from books and music and film to things like culture and race and language.

she’s smarter and far more beautiful than she dares herself to show.

and you will love her.

you will love her like you’ve never loved anybody before.

she will level every winter your body has suffered with all the springs her bones have weathered.

and when you go, because you can no longer handle her, she will drown herself in alcohol and drugs and sorrow. and wonder why she wasn’t good enough.

she will refuse to be saved by any other hand because nobody can touch her quite like you.

she will **** herself with loneliness and then resurrect with her own scent.
and then she will do it again.

and again.

and again.

and again.

she will be weak and strong and bold and shy and mean and nice and everything in between.

she will grow. she will grow strong and tall.

and so will you.

and in ten years from now, when you run into her at the supermarket, she will ask about your marriage.

and while you’re there telling her about your wife, who is home with the kids, and your job, she will feel genuinely happy for you.

because she forgave you. she forgave you for walking away and she forgave herself for ever thinking she wasn’t good enough.

she will have realized by then that sometimes life will give you somebody just to watch you break when it takes them away from you.

and she will be okay with it.

and so will you.

but, she will walk away without telling you about her life because she doesn’t want you to hear it in her voice that she still remembers your birthday, and that birthmark on your right shoulder.

and that ten years ago, she had hoped you would run into somebody else and told them all about her being at home with the kids.

do not date a girl
who writes.
she will internalize
everything,
carve poems
into your eyelashes
instead of
kissing them,

she will analyze you,
calculate age
from the rings
your coffee cup
leaves
instead of refilling it.

she will memorize
the way your
lips curl around steam,
but not that you
take it
two sugars,
no cream.

she will read your
palm instead of
holding it
against her chest.

she will not
blink
when you leave,
because she is
already
romanticizing it.