We are what we are,
even when all we ever learned from life is
1. we bleed because we are born that way
2. how to play with fire
Danger is singing sweet and fierce between us.
Your eyes-
black like a raven,
black like the underside of a storm.
When we look at each other its a revelation.
Want holds me harsh and burning,
the air between us thrumming with this is mine.
In my dreams,
I chase the sound of you humming to violins,
completely blind.
In your dreams,
everything burns.
Things you hate,
things you love,
things that were never yours in the first place.
Sometimes,
through the roar and crackle,
you think you hear a song.
Tonight,
with the sky painted demon orange and unholy gray,
my heart taps out a frantic rhythm against the cage of my ribs.
Like a cypher,
like a language I only just started learning,
like a song I'm hearing for the last time.
Your smile is a powerful
terrible
wondrous thing,
slashed across your face like a scar,
white hot and hard and glittering.
Fear and joy and rage are the same,
after all.
We call it love in its worst,
most desperate form.
I'm here,
I've been here,
I love you.
And: you are burning all the time,
a star so slow you're almost backwards.
I am never looking anywhere else.
You are everything golden that I have never deserved,
have never been given,
will never know how not to ruin,
how not to hurt,
how not to destroy.
Now,
a list;
1. You, leaning your head into my hands, knowing I'll kiss you if you just close your eyes.
2. The impossible swell in my chest, foreign and aching and terrifying.
3. Your hands, in all my dreams, in all my realities, reaching into the unforgiving dark.

It was dark and snowing when we met,
flakes gone gold in the street lamps,
laying themselves to rest in your ebony hair.
The whole earth pausing in anticipation
for icy winter to give way to spring.
So now,
in the magic of packed earth,
in the things that dare come out of it;
you.
Surrounded by Irises
that are hauntingly dark.
Your hips,
draped chaotically in a white sheet
looking like a greek god.
Impossibly regal.
The trees sing your name when I pass;
even when you are not here,
you never leave me.
I am always thinking about you.
Many things are lost on me,
but not this;
the worn leather of your broken watch,
your piano hands,
the ink smudges on your skin.
How we forgive winter for destroying what's beautiful,
because we see a little bit of it in ourselves.

Our bare feet
in a carpet of yellow flowers.
You,
nearly asleep in the back of the jeep,
letting me slide your glasses off in the dark.
You are beautiful in your happiness,
for your naivety,
for your wit,
because of the way you make tea.
Every day you are kinder,
gentler,
and more magnificent.
Your sharp eyes
and your soft hands--
the quiet clink of your rings against each other.
I want you to kiss me and leave.
I want you to kiss me and stay.
I don't care if you're late.
I’ve been waiting for you my whole life.
So I learned how to live like this,
how to drink in a desert,
constantly on the cusp of summer.
Those restless, humid nights.
The whole sky is talking.
A long stairway,
a quiet glance.
A king, at sunrise.
The entire world thinks softly of you.
You are the love of everyone’s life.

Want is never a graceful thing.
Want stays hungry
and it always wins.
The way we love each other is explosive,
all bare feet burning on the sunburned concrete.
So,
again,
but this time, softer.
You are a culmination of beautiful things trying to manifest themselves.
Its unsettling,
this feeling is unsettling.
I don't like that this ley line,
this live wire,
this intangible thing dancing between us,
doesn't have a name.
Everything should have a name.
Nothing in the world worth having comes easy,
right?
Nobody told me it would be like this.
And it wasn't easy,
right?
But we already knew that.
We sort of even hoped for it.
The sticking and burning it takes to become good again
has always made me restless.
I like it,
I think,
especially when we dance,
especially when we sing.
And when they ask me why,
I will say you.
I will always say you.
So,
maybe this isn't the winning universe,
but we'll never stop trying, right?
How long could I live with those almosts?
Please,
tell me your name in a dead language.
I will say it like a hymn.
Like Achilles,
we'll take it one step too far.
I'll let it haunt me in broad daylight.
Love,
the past is full of ghosts.
Make them stay.

Make them mine.

You have never been anywhere but here.
All of your memories are mine,
too.
Sipping fanta from ceramic mugs,
curled up on the kitchen floor.
Theres supposed to be a lesson,
here,
about growing up
and growing apart,
but I am sunblind,
unseeing.
Even when the gowns come off,
when the train door closes,
I still care about all of this.
You will never not be a part of me.
Four years
and still,
still,
still,
the light bends around you,
reaching through the dark.
I am glad we got to do this together.
All this time.
I love you no matter what you become.

Pulling your blanket back on when it falls off in the night.
***** feet
and raspberry stained hands.
You, chewing on ice.
Me, sipping lemonade through red straws.
Moths that haunt the street lamps.
Dancing home alone,
ghosts that sing you to sleep,
old records on the table.
Riding your bike as the sun sinks sleepily at your back.
Being pressed up against the back door.
The seasons.
Winter.
Freedom.
Naked, terrible beauty.
Watching your back receding down the long, sunlit hall.
The two of us,
always running away from eachother.

I miss you in the mornings
when you teach the foxes to dance,
barefoot and all a trick of the light.
You are peculiar,
though all the best things are.
We may not break the bone,
but we do drink the marrow.
Yes, you say.
Wait for me, if nothing else.
Yes,
though I see how it pains you to admit it,
to spit it, to rip it out,
in spite of it being true.
You, whose only weapon is a shield.
You, who are free.
It is easy to forget
that Dionysus was the god of chaos,
too,
and that theres a bit of him in all of us.
We don't have to move the mountain.
We can live in the caves
and learn to be less real than we are.
We say new things in an old language.
The enemy ships land,
and we join them on the beach,
spinning round their fires,
singing war songs to each other's reaching hands.
How strange to be a part of something
and still be your own.

I do not think that I am safe
because I love you.
You are breathtaking in the sort of way
you just never get used to.
The pulsing of your ichor heart is unhesitating,
relentless.
You are all red popsicles melting
in the heavy June sun.
Letting you rough me up a little bit.
I love you like a boxing match I won't win.
Fog so thick you can hardly see the ground.
Green on green on green,
and kissing with your eyes closed.
One emerald eye and the other gold.
Smuggling hyacinth into my spine.
We're going soft in the elbows
for having all the space in the world.
Your gentle palms,
your bruised knuckles,
kissing me halfway out the window.
In the low light.
With the wind chimes.
You,
sliding your ****** hands into my overcoat,
hurrying your mouth into mine.

You've got me burning away from the inside.
I meet you on the back porch,
windblown and beautiful,
with shaking hands and a racing heart.
It begins,
as anything worthwhile does,
with the chime of your luagh.
You stand lost for both breath and words,
and if I hadnt loved you before,
I certainly do now.
You love me glacier slow and golden,
though I am anthing but.
Truthfully,
you've never been good at staying where it was safe.
There is nothing contained about this.
Nothing tame.
Nothing careful.
Some people are born with soulmates,
and some people make them,
like a whetstone honing a blade.
Besides,
who wouldn't fan this flame?
I deserve to be loved how I want to be loved,
and I want broken.
I want fire-starved.
I want unkowable.

I want it here,
where dark things make a legend of themselves.

Time stops when you're running away from me.
We are rising with the sun,
singing the moon to sleep.
Your voice is an aubade to the meadow.
We don lopsided crowns
to go out and **** kings.
The seasons turns before I wonder
if the wind ever won your war.
You tip your head back and smile,
easy and teeth bared,
watch the way I let go of my handlebars.
We have never looked so young.
You say my name like a hymn.
We leave peaches on the windowsill
and mint leaves on the porch.
Our own kind of magic.
Not even the earth has enough hands
to hold us hostage.
We lay down in the flowers
just to say something terrible.
It might be the first time I've spoken in years,
the way the words scrape my throat.
You dont need a reason to be free.

I run not on earth,
but on blood alone.
By salt,
by sand,
by sea.
I can feel your wake from the other side of the bay,
pulling on me like a riptide.
I am looking at you
and you are looking back,
and the wind carries the smell of thunder and oncoming rain.
The sea things to us both,
but you always come home to me.
You are all kinds of too brave for this,
but I'm in the mood to be terrifying.
"Are you afraid?"
you say.
I don't know what I am,
but its not afraid.
It's everything, if your lucky.
I've got this memory of you,
throwing something foul into the ocean.
A wish,
a curse.
Standing on the white cliffs
looking like a sacrifice.
You told yourself that I would never be your weakness.
Love, its a little late for that.
This land will take you,
if you let it.
There is no such thing as faith, here.
All there is
is me loving you
and the changing of the tides.
The wind has its nimble fingers in your fine,
fair hair,
and the waves crash like applause.
You look absolutely godless.
I love you bloodhungry and harsh.
Striking, predatory,
fever pitched and unknowable.
I love you dead.

God,
I remember when I used to be afraid of the ocean.

I lose my first life to lightning,
of all things.
I spend the next day
racing through a field of camellias
while golden hour twists the sky yellow.
They are redder than red,
like the crests of your cheekbones
and the tips of your ears-
even your blushes are incredibly focused.
I'm so happy I dont know what to do with myself.
I wait for you as you stand in the middle of the street
watching the sun sink into a kaleidoscope of orange.
Your back is to me
though I feel like I have never seen you more clearly.
You smile radiantly into the distance.
I want to care about things like that.
I want to love things, too.
My second life is stolen by fire.
In the whirlwind of my return,
I find you waiting for me
with an umbrella and a smile
underneath the willow tree.
When I was younger
I thought there was a piece of the puzzle missing.
You make me feel like there wasnt even a puzzle to begin with.
I want to keep you
but I refuse to own a cage.
I trip on my way to take your hands
in the willow-broken light of the afternoon.
You laugh with your entire body.
It's like I have never truly understood poetry until right now.
You are the embodiment
of that peculiar space in between the seasons.
With you goes all things bold and brave and beautiful.
I've got 25 lives
but I love you like I hardly have one.

We grew up.
We grew into eachother.
I cant tell where I end
and you begin.
We make eachother younger,
braver people.
I look at you and I just
want and want and want.
I want things I dont know how to ask for.
It sticks in my head like bubblegum
on the bottom of my shoe.
Everything feels so incredibly vast.
How do you let go of something
thats already a part of you?
I say your name just to feel it in my mouth again.
All I can see is that October rain
dancing down the lines of your hair
and the gentle ***** of your nose.
Its the kind of thing that makes me want to take deep breaths.
I am storm soaked
and full up in love.
How fine and rare and beautiful it is
to simply exist.

I am trying to be brave
and wild
and kind to myself.
I accept only the peachy things.
Everything good in the world induces fire and destruction;
two things you and I
have grown to love.
The seasons are changing
and every road leads
right back to you.
I love you with the elegance and grace of a trainwreck.
Like the sweeping inhale
before you let yourself scream
on the way down a rollerocaster.
I melt into you
waiting at the bottom of the bike path in autumn.
Erasing anything that calls itself distance.
We are the result
of June and midnight and becoming good again.
The clementines,
the fields,
good god, the sun.
I love it so much I want to hit something.
We can have any of it.

We can have all of it.

I am all want.
Every inch of my skin is covered in fire ants,
I'm sure of it.
You've got a voice like a gunshot
and a tangerine mouth.
I am completely sunblind.
All I see is carnal yellow.
I could live in it.
I could love in it.
I would use a time machine to go back and meet you sooner.
You turn my spine into magma;
writhing and fusing
to whatever dares come this close.
The heat of it makes me smile younger and care harder.
I love you with the windows thrown open.
I tell you like you tore it out of me.
The air is an inferno but we keep breathing in;
I take a long look at your hands.

I think about religion.

Its in the splitting,
Its in the calamity and coming back again.
This is the part where we say yes,
even with all the breaking.
It is hard to look at you.
That sun soaked body.
Standing somewhere in between
where we were
and where we are going.
I would never ask you to leave that place
the way you asked me to stay in it.
I leave my yesterdays behind,
when I can.
Yes, I was smaller then.
I used to fit there.
But I have changed
and nothing else has followed.
I have outgrown it,
I have outloved it.
If you're asking,
Yes I was angry.
Yes, I still love you.
You are the only bones I ever kneeled before.

Both time and I are frozen
in between your hands.
A pair of green eyes--
halfstop.
I am coming unstuck in time.
I grow young again,
I go back and fix the yesterdays.
We go back to March 15th,
and this time you say
Yes, I love you.
Yes, I'm happy.
Yes,
Yes,
Yes.
We make it simple this time around.
A hand grazes breezily up my spine--
halfstop.
We stand in front of each other again.
We are laughing like wind chimes in a dust devil.
Back,
and back,
and back.
I open my eyes
and find myself facing a
slightly younger version of you.
"You're here"
you say.
I pause--
halfstop.
Sixteen year old you is in love with me.
Fifteen year old you doesn't know it yet.
I wonder what age I have found you in.
I place the scab on your wrist,
I know it on sight.
I remember tumbling over the handlebars
of your red Schwinn bike
and taking you with me.
Fifteen.
I smile.
This you is old enough to at least know when I am going.
"Take me with you,"
you say.
Love,
I've been trying.

I do not know how to turn this into poetry,
so I say it in the dark,
while we cover our eyes.
And it isn't fair,
really.
I don't see you for years,
and I'm still not over you?
You used to say that running away from things
doesn't make them go away.
Well, good,
then.
Even after all this time.
It was always hard to watch you give up on everything.
I never wanted to be a part of that list.
For the record,
I think I'm in love with you.
You smile the same way you did
when we were 16;
artless and unbinding,
like it is pivotal that everything stays this way
for just one more moment.
We grew up,
but we are still the same.
That boundless love of living--
the joy of it.
This
and this,
and this,
I say.
I look at you like I never learned to do anything else.

I have nothing to my name
and I let you take it from me,
over
and over.
If I could be only one thing,
I would be your chaotic, chosen mistake.
I will be that mistake in any existence,
in any town,
in any life.
We are living in that moment
between jumping off the swing
and hitting the ground.
That kind of gravity
turns people senseless.
I will deal with the sunburn,
because neither of us are getting out of this ocean.
We are all elbows and spines and knees.
In our defense;
freedom.
Summer.
I love you right down to the bone.
Satellites crash red and splintered into us.

Nobody tries to make us good again.

We were green and chaotic,
then.
Everything was foolish and heartful and marvelous,
the anarchic knot of your shoelaces,
the weedy attempt to stifle your wild laugh.
I would learn you again
and again.
I smile and it is crooked and joyful,
and you will never be able to unknow it.
Today we are older
and every bit as reckless.
Eld could drink our blood and grow young again.
We keep saying yes.
There are some things
we say only in the dark.
And it’s not about nervousness,
good god,
its for the thrill of it.
It seems impossible to exist in only this space.
I don’t know who I am when I am not looking at you.
I don’t know how to be that person again.
I will always love a wild thing.

I know what I'm capable of.

The sky gathers itself
and sighs a long,
clement sigh.
We are present tense
because you’re here
and I love you,
golden and mollifying
when the welkin ruptures behind your ribs.
Everything lingers.
Today I am overcome with the burden of burning.
We singe sedately in the yellow light of morning.
You probably don't understand right now,
But I'm in love with you.
Please, help me take the curtains down.
God, don't make me say it.
I love you. I'm in love with you.
I turn to you like heaven on hell.
The situation is grave;
the way we look at eachother,
the way we devour everything,
like time,
like fire,
like gravity.
In us everything melted.
Give me a word for the unbearable sun.
You ruin me grandly,
and I let you.
I dont care what holds the universe up,
anymore.
It has us pinned against time.
Who do you love?
"It’s still you.
Its always you."
It is foolish and young,
but I have been waiting so long
to hear you say my name.
Just the timbre of it.
You kiss me in burning houses
and I don't bother looking back.
I sink for you,
like honey into hands.

Your rapture is infectious,
genuine,
and unconditional.
You are endearing in a way that is physically painful to me.
I adore you like a wildfire.
Your eyes have been shaped like a laugh since noon.
Everything is viscid with the scent
of your youth;
sycamore,
marjoram,
tattered baseball gloves,
and a whisper of burning wood.
I’m a little in love with all of it.
Summer digs its way into my veins.
You dissolve into a splendid and fearless laugh.
Its dripping with a sort of ferocious, tranquil charm.
One of my hands is a promise,
the other is a secret,
and darling,
they are identical;
I have been missing you
as long as I have known you.

I’m doing it again.
I’m getting mawkish,
from loving something without knowing why,
loving something so mammoth,
loving it so grandly,
that I don't even know where to put my heart down.
Ah, there it is.
You’re getting so much closer
to what your eyes remind me of.
That indefinite cavity,
that sweeping emotion of your piano teeth,
that bewitching graze of your pomegranate hands.
I almost can't bear to look at you.
The world is humming around your existence.
Shivering, trembling,
earthshaker, sunbringer.
You are frighteningly alive.
Nothing is the truth until you get your hands on it.
There is a careful and loving precision
to the way I glimpse at you.
Darling,
we’ve developed this habit
of closing wounds
but never cleaning them.

I always find you in the saltwater room
where everything burns
and our eyes are closed.
May is monsoon season, here.
It's making me restless-
but maybe its just you.
I cant help but wonder,
was this an ordinary sinking?
You keep looking at me
from the other side.
Eyes unblinking,
and very,
very blue.
The rain keeps drumming on.
It knows I'm home, I suppose.
Perhaps it was no ordinary sinking.
Perhaps something more than you and I
was meant to make it back to shore.
Thats not the point, though.
The point is that I cant remember what kind of boat we were on.
The point is that there's no way to tell.
The point is that saltwater cleans wounds.

I still sigh at the smell of citrus.
How could I not?
It was always you and that crate of oranges,
ambling towards the market
and me.
The flowers turn to you
instead of the sun when they pass.
I figure they don't know the difference.
I keep swearing to gods I stopped believing in.
Cyrus,
I've got oleander in my eyes
and my teeth
and my everything.
We didn't mean to water it so well,
But how could we not?
I keep seeing this phantasm
where I'm peeling oranges in the kitchen.
It smells like weathering wood and you.
The window is open
while you smile at me through it,
one hand placed gently on the windowsill.
My soul be ******.
You look like magic.
I watch you hand me an orange,
gently,
tenderly.
I don't remember taking that step forward.
I suppose it's always like that with you.
Cyrus,
they say that oranges are for good fortune.
How could they not?

You smile like dandelion wine.
I sat easy, despite my shaking hands.
Hands and knees and hearts
strike roots in the earth.
Week old bruises lace my spine,
and you knew the names of all the flowers.
So yes, I’d give all my tomorrows
for a single yesterday.
Yes, I’d still burn the whole world.
I will still buy the matches.

You are the only god
I’ve ever believed in.

I eat honey
Straight from the jar.
I try not to make you laugh,
In this moment.
If you did,
I'd hear it pealing through the trees for the rest of my life.
I look down the street
I've been standing on.
I see you and the setting sun.
I am not sure there's a difference.
"Last time we were young and stupid.
And we only had one bike."
Well, I say.
This time we have two.