Skeleton's smiles haunt me.
They're so open, big,
and free.
They know what life has brought them,
*and that's how i want to be.

There is no more straddling state lines for you.  

You are no longer teetering on the edge of
               life          and           death
because you are now deader than my father’s
dead bell heart.  You are laying in a morgue and
I am sitting on a train, miles and miles from you.  An
early bloomer, a preemie baby boy, you are
                                                                ­              one day too soon.  

I am watching the trees of Arkansas of Missouri of Illinois
pass me by, but you are being
                                                      whisked
                                                                ­      and
                                                                ­               twirled
                                                                ­      and
                                                      whirled
                    through the stars.
(I am trying to imagine what it must feel like to
explode into a supernova, to
implode into a constellation.
I am trying to contemplate what it means to
reach                    
                            i n f i n i t y        
                                  and
                 ­           n i h i l i t y
                                                             at the same time.)

Careening headfirst towards the midwest, I
am heading towards a home I no longer wish to go.  I have
spent my night in a daze between
                                                              asleep        and        awake,
listening to a man snore and a baby cry, and nothing is stopping
me from thinking about the steps in post-mortem care.  I have
seen dead bodies before.  I have touched dead bodies before.  
I do not want to come in contact with yours.  

My problem is not that you finally finished your
transition from                  boy        to        skeleton,
my problem is that you did so without
asking your mother’s permission.  I read the
Book of James the night before your surgery two years ago
and forgot it the very next day.  There is nothing I want more
than to swim laps and crochet scarves and write bad poems and
become void of all the information that I currently hold.

I want to forget that I knew you.
I want to forget that I thought I loved you.
I want to forget my attachment to you so it won’t
hurt as bad now that you’re
                                                   ( d e a d ) .

I wish I didn't feel so empty without you

   I'm hollow
      All that's left is my core
         I'm just paper thin, tearing skin
   **All I've left is my black heart, melting away

I am searching for my bones;
fissured and brittle,
scattered haphazardly amongst full, upright skeletons
between the hairline fractures lie Polaroids of moments,
I slid them between the spaces so they wouldn’t fall out,
I took the sharpest point of lead to all the surfaces and traced the pattern of our descent;
– mine,
have you seen my bones?
I am sifting through dirt and sand to find them,
through shrub and bush,
through strewn sweatshirts and muddy shoes;
the archaeology of my body is missing,
I am weathered;
decayed and holed
I give each bone away in the hopes that maybe later it may be rediscovered
I gave you my wrist for you wanted to write upon it how much you want to hold on to it
and I gave you my pelvis to grasp and grip as I feel yours slide against mine
and I gave you my foot to pick up and place where I should be.
I feel extinct –
do I exist without that which holds my mass of muscles?
I collapse under their weight
I strung up my fingers and hung them around your neck to feel them on your chest when I couldn’t
I broke off that rib and moulded it around your coffee cup to see every morning when you inhale its bitterness
do you read what’s written on the fissures?
I know my writing may be illegible but you must strain, as I did, to see –
those Polaroids are fading; the landscape of the ocean you once photographed is disappearing into white
I am aimless, frameless without them
I am searching for my bones
to gather,
and pile
all in one pit;
a hole of calcium:
built, hollowed frames
and take a hammer to them all;
a mallot,
send shards of bone soaring
I cannot have them in my possession,
holding my poor structure,
my amorphous figure,
and neither can
you.

but now i'm just some bare stripped bones, they've taken everything that made me myself, and i'm completely gone just a slow beating heart and a couple of bones, *******, and hollow-voiced lies.
And the worst part?
You don't even notice.

my skeleton never liked me
very much. it cracks in unusual
places, ribcage poking out of its
skin prison, the frailty of it
breaking beneath the musical
whispers of the wind through hollow
spaces.  i see

light bursting beneath the flash
of a camera and my skin
incinerates - do not look do not touch
do not look - and the charcoal in
my lungs is set on fire. i wake up
with ash beneath my tongue
far too often. my skin

despises me now that i have
bruises in places no one could
kiss better. there's this scar above
my right knee, which dislocates when
my life falls out of its socket, and it
reopens and blood pours from the
renewed wound too often. i think

i have a body that likes to believe it is dying.

I'm disgusted with the skeleton that shows through my skin,
and my heart palpitates to a beat that I cannot trace,
I feel so weak and you stand so tall,
and I wonder if the roles were reversed,
if I could stand up as straight as you,
and if you would be able to keep yourself stitched together,
because I am always trapped in a state of frigid failure and I think
that I might be falling apart on the inside and out but
yet I never change and nothing ever happens
to make anyone notice tha-
I wonder if I will ever be whole because some days I cannot
even decide what to wear in the morning and I always,
always think about perception and things like that,
for example I accidentally dropped my earring down the sink
yesterday and I just started sobbing into the mirror and I wonder
what people thought about me,
like maybe I was having a mental
breakdown but then again,
perhaps that earring was a family heirloom that was worth
more money than a lawyer would ever make,
yet seeing yourself from the outside is different
than seeing your own reflection,
Jesus I never wanted to admit this but I think that I am dying
but I cannot stop myself from keeping the same habits and patterns
and the feeling never leaves anyway
and I always wondered how people had the time
to pray to a higher power
because I could never even wake up in
the morning without four alarms set just in case,
if Jesus decides to come down from chilling up on a cloud and talk
to a little person such as me,
I wonder if he would be able to see all the emotions
that I carry or if he would try to convert me to Christianity,
even though I was raised that way I always just felt lost
and I just could not wrap my head around self-sacrifice like that
until I met you and I realized that your life was most defiantly
worth at least ten of mine,
I'm frightened to think that one day I could end up all alone,
even though I'm pretty sure that I already am because
I push everyone away that does not understand the way that I feel.

My hands shake and tremble even when I am holding yours
and I'm sorry that you are trapped by someone like me.