Your hands are a spare room for grass blades and wilting flowers —
they wound just the same now,
die just the same.
One day we will too.
I breathe you in,
stale air and brimstone fill my lungs
like the flood that came after us —
it has our name on it:
a misguided retribution.

I remember leaving,
the soil turning parched as our soles,
the shadows' first treason,
the cold, cold air,
the distance between our clothed body,
drifting away like continents.
Soon, you will speak in tongues,
a language you cannot love me in
and still, I'll call your name, softly,
like a desperate counter-curse.

I am still here,
a darkened rib for the devil to collect.
I am yours first, before I am his.
But you are worth the fire and the first sin it's ever seen
the crash site, the rock shards buried on my arms —
I am good as a dead woman — a wide-eyed mortal
I will walk to you on skipping stones,
sinking stones
with my bones set on fire and the world up in flames —
this is our undoing in the colors of a sunset
but it's nothing we've seen before.

I know good. I know evil.
I know flames and the way it burns. I know death and its finality.
I know a lot of things now,
but only one of them matters, Adam —

I know you are worth the fall.

i'm still building myself up on top of breaking skin. oh how easy it is to slip on this shapeless, humming loneliness until it takes the form of my skin. i'm a forsaken deity, learning to come to terms with what's left of her ruins. crumbling, i tie them together — they buckle in place like my knees: a sight too fragile to be a worldly wonder. i'm still learning to be gentle. i'm still learning to forget all the ways i have ever hurt myself. and beyond this corpse-cold bed, these corpse-cold hands — the world goes on spinning. restless as my thoughts, yet immobile as my feet. it goes on spinning — leaving, never slowing itself down for anyone.

these words come out of my tongue, in fragments. i pick them like aphids on a rose — maybe it's the closest thing i'll get to healing.

Did you know that I once wrote you a poem?
Yes, I wrote you a poem! Once.
Carefully choosing words, strategically placing them one after each other,
desperately trying to convey, I don't know what.
I think it was love - so you told me.
I wrote you a poem, didn't you read it?

A friend told me to write about real love.
'Real love', she said. 'Your stories are too melancholy', she said.
I see them as funny, as love can be sometimes.
Wasn't our love funny (sometimes)?
I think it was - so you told me.
Do you know that I once wrote you a poem?

We parted as we started, equally dividing the plants,
the books, the plates, the cutlery and eventually the friends.
We saw each other the day, glancing out the corner of our eyes,
pretending to be elsewhere.
We saw, and passed without one word being spoken. Not one.

Don't you know that I once wrote you another poem?
Yes, I wrote you another poem! Once.
Carefully choosing words, strategically placing them one after each other,
as I wrote about 'real love' - I think.
Yeah, it was real love and, a poem with no words...
...because as with 'real love',
the words were never spoken.

I once wrote you a poem,
didn't you read it?

Thoughts of you
Still smolder
In the ashes of
a forgotten ******
That never
Was.

             -L. Frost

I am wanting to be wanted
Not by all, at least by someone
But nobody ever keeps me first
The fears I carry, have often held me to shun
 
I try to feign, I pay no heed
But I espy all the tenuous changes
I try not to get distressed
But I end up getting hurt, knowing people have multiple faces.
 
Everybody loses interest, as time passes by
Nobody keeps a check on anybody, be it me or you
All are engrossed, I know. I wonder if they lie
I’ve come to realize, everyone becomes someone I once knew.

If while unveiling my vulnerability,
I collapse into smithereens
Will you hug me tight enough,
To help my broken pieces stick back together?
 
If while wearing a fake smile,
And dissembling my true emotions
Will you try and understand what I feel?
Will you not compel me, to not be me?
 
If while being veracious to me,
I fall in love with you
Will you fall in love with me too?
Will you not leave me, like others eventually do?