I miss the way you
punctuate my sentences
put purpose in my windswept
words
complete me
make sense of my
heaps of jumbled gibberish
you
hold me when Im
running on
when youre
gone Im
stuck split in splices
and tacky fragments

I wrote a poem that perfectly
captures the essence of being
in love with you,
and I'll never put pen to paper again
for fear of dirtying
everything pure and holy
you bestowed on that page.

I'm losing to the wind; he knows
I need his wayward rushing gusts
and I love the way he puts
my hair in my mouth and
air in my chest.
His spirit gently roars,
tangling my words and
bringing me to my knees.
He carefully envelops
past, present, and future; a
tornado deftly encircling
everything I've ever known.
There’s something ethereal
in the way
gravity shies from his gale
and how he artfully folds rhythm
into my breaths.
I wish I could love him with
even an inch of the miles he
spans, but
until I learn to fly I’ll
lower my windows and
fill my lungs.

because the night burns heavy
like tears hugging
the back of my eyes,
and the seconds run electric
like air buzzing
in the space between your fingers.
Rosy I-love-yous
turn to quick to
thorny goodbyes
stuck scratching my throat
as my lips fight fate.
Give me breath again
show me we were never happy happenstance,
string my soul out into
baskets woven holy
for the sanctity of us.
Drive slow
buy me time to pray
that we are eternal beings,
unbound from time, able to see
beyond seven colors to someday.
But maybe
in the end it doesn’t
matter how slow you drive, because
even after you leave, I’m there
in your car
always, every moment
in memory.

I say,
hoping it’s too quiet for you to hear,
but you do
and with one hand,
you press your finger to my lips,
and with the other, you
give me everything I
do not have the words to
ask for.

I’ve got a habit of
splintering my mistakes
and strapping them to your bedroom ceiling
in self-pitiful stucco style,
where they glare at me
like waking nightmares and
strip me of the sainthood
with which you clothe me.
I fill our little boat
with my buckets of vice,
submerging us in overshared sob stories -
but somehow you are
breath, underwater, always
you are soap
washing my hands and
kissing my fingers
using yours to brush burning tears
from my cheeks.
Your forgiveness
glues my lips shut
as I desperately try to justify
my self-perception, leaving me with
no choice but to return
each precious favor.

Your mind is the bed
of an Elysian river
of thought
and when acid rain came, you
built dams to punish yourself
by keeping that toxic water
from ever
flowing out
to sea.
I may not know how
to break through your walls, but I’ll
sit on these banks
shedding a tear for each
polluted drop of rain
until, perhaps, one day my
Hope will
run your
waters pure.