I want to pick out wallpaper with you.
I want to laugh
While we're in the grocery store
Deciding what to make for dinner.
I want to fall asleep ten minutes into the movie
Wrapped in your arms
No makeup, no clothes, no worries.
It seems
Such a grownup way to want someone,
Such a different way to love.
But
I have been searching my whole life
For a way to exist in this world.
This ordinary, mundane world
This place I've done much to escape from and to
Dream
My way out of.
I remember once I wrote a poem
About how big things don't **** you,
Small things do.
I said people turn to ash as life wears them away
And crumble into their morning cereal.
The mundanities of life
Seemed killers to me.
But you...
You bring joy to every ordinary moment.
I already know the beauties of this world well.
I stop and make myself see them.
It is the dullness I've neglected, the little boring things--
I've never gotten to treasure ordinariness.
I've always had to slip past moments of silence like a shadow, hoping not to linger long enough to feel lonely.
You have opened up
Half the world for me.
You have given me the freedom to look forward to
Every shopping trip
Every chore
Every lazy Sunday.
Things that let my demons out before
Now I can treasure them,
Now you've let the sun in on them
And I don't know if you'll understand how incredible that is when you read this poem
But I can assure you
...It's the best.

I.

I’ve swallowed too many I love you’s
to be afraid of coughing up blood.
They cut you on secret.
Who knew it was drinking gasoline
and sawdust and every little inflammable thing
and then sitting down cross-legged
in the heart of a howitzer; soft.

II.

You are a soft explosion.
You are streaks of a rebel orange
in a sky that is supposed to be blue.
You are steel rods in the curve of my spine,
holding me straight.

III.

I love you’s are like death notes written in ash:
you’ll have to smoke your way to it.
Smoke cigarettes, journals, curtains,
and yourself to get that much ash in your lungs;
trying to blow smoke rings into your finger;
my ceiling knows more about my sadness than you do.

IV.

Saying an I love you once will have you
chanting “don’t leave me” on a rosary;
love will take your bones and leave you
lusting for somebody whose back
is the last thing you’ll see, and whose
skin you’ll think you left your keys in:
and now you’ve locked yourself out
of your own house, in a storm
whose sirens wail in your ears and remind
you, you’re hopeless and homeless.

V.

I love you’s leave no exit wounds,
no shell casings, and when the time comes
you’ll be telling them all how his bullet
ricochets in your ribs,
but emotion never made up for evidence
in the court of settlements for a broken heart.

VI.

Telling someone you love them is like cutting your jugular
and not expecting to bleed out.

VII.

I love you like the pages of a mad girl’s journal.

VIII.

The moon turns from an ally
to the haunting image of science and realisation:
you share the same sky, but no longer the same bed.
And astronomy keeps ******* you over
when you look up at the sky
and no longer understand constellations.

IX.

Love makes it more getting-back-at-you
than getting-back-together-with-you.

X.

Every time you taste blood,
you’ll know you kissed somebody
with teeth like needles
and they cut you everywhere; they
bit you, they bit you, they bit you
and you kept letting them.

Look at me.
Look at how I used to wander the night
A craving so excruciating, so white hot, so secret
Blooming in my heart
Feeling my love like a disease-
A disease of the blood
Pumping molten silver through my veins and forcing me to struggle inside my skin
Walking, walking, always searching in the night
For something to cool me.
Look at how I used to think
That
Was joy.
It was a tainted joy. It was a stolen joy.
I loved
All alone I loved these people
And I burned with it,
I left scorch marks on the ground where I stepped,
I left embers burning and smoldering wherever I lay my hands, those nights.
I could feel the heat
Unbearable
Inside of me, like holding your hand over a candleflame.
It seared me. It ruined me, in many ways.
I worshiped the ashes of my clawing passion,
Subdued and restrained, imprisoned and
Hushed
For so long that it starved and rattled the bars of my ribcage in ire.
Look at me, how I was
How wrong
I was
That love could only be that.
Out of fear, I believed that love
Always meant shame.
Always meant secrets.
Always meant
Holding my burning heart in my hands and feeling the pain of it
Protecting somebody from my punishing passion.

But then you came.

You
With your soft eyes, green and shining and full of love.
You with your skin like silk
With words of love for me that brought no fear,
With hands that melted me from the inside out
And arms that held me together when I cried
Because I was ashamed of how I loved you.
You looked me in the eyes.
You looked that in the eyes
And you loved me for it.
You loved me for the love I have been hated for
All my life
And I could fall at your feet.
I could,
But for the first time,
I would rather lie in your arms.
I want your breath, your tenderness.
I want your solidity, the weight of you, the comforting way we fit together.
You are no god, to me. You are more. You are so much more.
No pedestals for you, no altars. I cannot bear to be so far from you as to worship.
I need you up against my heart, I need you in my arms.
You can't be an angel- I couldn't let you rise,
I would beg you to stay here on earth with me
And kiss me one more time and tell heaven
You'd be there tomorrow.
I don't want to start wars in your name,
I want to spend the rest of time
Murmuring it in my sleep as I roll over to kiss your shoulder
In the middle of the night
While the moonlight slants through the curtains to make your hair into a halo.
I want a life with you, not a death for you,
I don't want to suffer for you, I want to laugh with you.

I used to think love could only be pain.
And then you came.
And I have never been so happy to be wrong.
I have spent my life writing poems
That exult love, that sing praise, that idolize.
I've felt every one of them. Felt that love that seemed so full, so complete
Tried to explain it with words stacked on words
When what I was really trying to do
Was give it without giving it.
Give it without someone to take it from me.
I wrote to confess, to release.

And then you came.
And now I write for a new reason-

My love,
You are not the sun. You are not the moon.
You need no comparisons, no sweeping metaphors.
You are simply and perfectly
The person I want to wake up next to
Until the end of time
And that
Is everything I have ever craved.