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.