I have always been mediocre at best
but you never make me feel that way.

I want your lips to tremble as I look you in the eye
and hook my fingers in your belt loops.
Lick my lips,
I am a big meal to take in,
and being a bad influence takes a lot of work, you know.

you cry like lost toys and dead pets
there's nothing you can do about it right now
you cry like a small animal with a broken spinal chord
you keep whimpering, but it can only heal in time
you cry like pressing the skin of your palms
into the membranes of your eyes

when everything in your head is so cacophonous
you want to rub away all the little things you absorb
want that your hands could throw out this migraine
like a candy wrapper on the sidewalk
and if you believe hard enough that it's gone
you'll never notice the sugar rush or the comedown
so you press your hands to your face
as hard as you can and try to pray like a religious person
but you were raised christian and american and
the ways of believing and hoping and loving that you knew as a child
seem insincere now, and hard to speak
the language is not truthful
everything is what they told you it was not
nothing is what they told you it was
or everything was always what it was
and you or i could've told them that

and you think that wrapper might eventually end up in a landfill
if you go throwing it carelessly around
and sadness taken with too much sugar can be a toxic combination
so maybe making the bad things go away
is harder than throwing away the wrapper and enjoying the rush
maybe the wrapper is somewhere else now you can't get to
where you can't hear it crinkle or see it shrivel,
but you can still relentlessly feel it
getting whittled away by time and weather
while steadily melting down bits of you
as you pass your heart around
gasping inside the icebox

until one day you look up and the sun is a bloodier color
and your lungs are full of ice like pins
freezing inside of you
and when seconds before you had oxygen
as you begin choking, you think it's amazing how long
it seems to have been
since you were alive

your knuckles are dry from holding on
to a rusty ladder wrung
even when you want to move so badly
and there's nowhere to climb
you refuse to jump
and you're still trying to figure out
how to fall correctly
to break the least amount of limbs

the bodies all break,
as one by one,
we walk to the ocean.
The salt spreads out my hair, puts holes in my clothes,
I try hard to keep calm,
but my lack of breath keeps me stuttering sentences,
"I...I promise I love you, it's just, I wanted to s-see the sun...hit the water."

on the leafy salad of my life
you are the dressing...
for without you its all just
let-us and wish-es!

I think I fell in love with him long before I even knew I did. I think I had fallen in love with him between trying to figure out if I had already or not. When he cried the day he thought I was going to smoke a blunt with a couple of kids older than me, and the day he told his best friend: "I think I'm falling in love with her." Up until right now, lying on my bed with my head rested on my crossed arms, listening to the sounds of his breaths lull him into deeper states of sleep; dreaming dreams you and I can attempt to imagine, but only a beautiful human being like him has the privilege to see for himself.
Sometimes when we're on the phone for a while, and I know he's tired because I can hear the rasp in his voice return just like the night before, when he was at the verge of sleep, I don't say anything. I just let him. I just let the silence fill the void between the crease of his struggling eyes, and I remain silent. I let his eyes close. Because I like when he falls asleep. It's comforting, and peaceful, and less lonely hearing his little intakes of breaths every so often.
Sometimes I don't want to hang up, because I know I'll be lonely again once the sleepy silence between our call has ended. I usually draw it out for an hour or so before I force myself to hang up, but never before confessing my love to him every night, quietly, as honestly as I can. Of course he can't hear me, but I always hope that maybe somewhere in his unconscious mind, my words are able to reach him. Maybe in his dreams. Or maybe they never do, seeing as though, occasionally, I remind him in the morning of what I said to him, and he smiles, and pleads for me to never stop.
And that's what makes it worth it. That's why I say words he may never hear. Because somewhere along the line, heard or unheard, my subtle words are still able to put a smile on his face. And I think that's all any of us strive for, is to smile, and to find love, and for love to find us. Whether or not we even know it ourselves.

I still haven't hung up.

I don't think I will.

"don't miss me too much"
you tell me and i laugh
claiming "psshhh don't worry"
when i want to tell you
how could i not
miss those dimples
that voice
your every
single
movement.
how could i not
worry about us
wait to hear
wonder
about
everything.
how could i not miss you
when you look at me
like that and
whisper in my ear
and kiss me so softly.
how could i not
begin to
fall for
you?