I am finally starting to understand winter nights for what they are:
sterility of a black sky, inner warmth that never quite touches skin, shivering on the side of the road after tequila and laughter have laid waste to four AM and it is only the traffic lights left to reflect you.

Maybe that's why we listen to the downbeats of summer, the slow songs made for rooftops but more devastating in the pitch dark of seven PM on a main road somewhere in the city, all alone and au revoir and sepia memories of honey-warm light leaking through the kitchen we used to share.

internal warmth and windchimes outside sing hellfire for the passing storm.

she ripped a hole in her socks every day, maybe just to feel the thorns and let her legs bleed / that kind of lovelyblindingfrightening thing that you want to run your fingers through, tug on her hair just to feel the resistance / you ask her what it means to be a constructed girl and she says ‘convict yourself of ****** and you’re halfway there’ / in the dirt, tearing out flowers like a lonely god in the universe - she’s bruised, and soft and waiting

my reflection, anatomical inaccuracy reads something like:

fairy dust in a silt layer, bones all shattered at the press of her fingers, and for months I molded a sandcastle around the soft

sinking, drinking ichor from a cocktail glass and dragging nails across my discomfort -

did you see that girl taking a tempest inside herself, to warp her sinew, spreading from this side of the universe to other?

in the lamplight I bit a secret onto the ridge of her spine; *sometimes I sleep near fires hoping my insides become glass

After the towers fell,
My father went off to war,
12 months later he brought back the battlefield
We didn’t talk about it much as it just hung there,
Afraid of the left over land mines, we would tiptoe
around the room, through the kitchen, back to bed.
-
My mother is a bottle,
Empty now but the glass corpse still outlines her frame,
4 years sober, going on 5 after her brother click-clacked his way out of our lives,
I tattooed the day he passed on my arm,
1. to remember him and 2. to know that today is better than what my life once was,
-
I read somewhere that conversations are like knife fights,
Ive chosen my words carefully like dull blades,
So if I am ever to strike a nerve it won’t leave anyone bleeding,
I am afraid of blood.
I hate the smell,
the taste, the color of the stains it leaves,
The consistency,
I am afraid of bleeding,
I am too vulnerable in this world to hurt anymore,
Every breath closer to the minute i’ll break,
I am afraid to break and i worry about how many pieces I will leave in my wake
and if anyone will be there to pick them up and glue me back together,
Today I am happier than most days in these past years,
She has taught me patience,
All I worry about now is losing her warmth