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.

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 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.