this love will sink its teeth on my throat and never let go, like a bite mark on the hollow of hyacinths. like closed fists on a burning letter. like serpentine sighs around my neck. in time, in vain, my poems will pay for this feeling but darling, i am intoxicated with the dark way that i am yours. i am high — high and reduced before your fevered kisses, and when all of this wears off, you'll find in place, in absolute constancy, in slate black eyes, that my love is yours — and yours alone.

your slow, burning kisses live off my trembling skin, for this alone, i will run out of poetry. i will fall at your feet, graceless, and at will. and i know this is madness. this is a disaster. this is the calm — all rolled into quiet, prosaic longings i can't begin to comprehend. this love, it scares me but not enough to run for my life. and i will have every bit of this moment committed to memory. i will bury it inside my ribs, away from the selfish hands of time. i will keep this love in a vial, hidden away beneath my tongue. always — this is my kind of always, my love, and some parts of me will never outgrow being yours.

this is the kind of madness i know. this is the kind of disaster. this is the kind of calm.

in the dark, i whisper, "tell me, love, does it scare you? does it scare you enough to run?"

i think i've always known i've loved you — in smudged postscripts in the next page of a letter, in the secrecy of bated breaths, and lonely, sunset afterthoughts. i think i've always known i've loved you, and to be able to say this now without fear or cowardice or equivocation: i've loved you, in past and in present tense — it's magic. it's transcendent. it's freeing, and free-falling, and stepping into the warmest summerlight. it's us — in subversion of poetry, yet just as beautiful, my love — and just as poetic.

i think i've always known i've loved you — in smudged postscripts in the next page of a letter, in the secrecy of bated breaths, and lonely, sunset afterthoughts. i think i've always known i've loved you, and to be able to say this now without fear or cowardice or equivocation: i've loved you, in past and in present tense — it's magic. it's transcendent. it's freeing, and free-falling, and stepping into the warmest summerlight. it's us — in subversion of poetry, yet just as beautiful, my love — and just as poetic.

maybe if you skin me alive, we’ll both know, finally, that this rotting chest is no place for you to leave love songs lying around. you see, my heart is both a soft and cruel place; each beat, a subtle atrocity to spilling outbreaths — a sheath for keeping your hunting knife. if you skin me alive, you’ll see the ghost towns after a new year’s eve. the slow dancing of grief before it screams its way out. the stab wounds, quiet and unhealing between cotton rows. the afterglow, graying at human touch.

if you skin me alive, you’ll see that there is no place for you here. you’ll see trembling. you’ll see staying still. you’ll see running away and never looking back. both wonder, and a conundrum — maybe more of one than the other.

these days, i am no longer sure if i am writing you love letters or writing you all my goodbyes.

maybe it’s more of one than the other —




maybe it always was.