We've found my pressure point it
seems, it's
every inch of my paper skin.
I'm sorry I
look like this,
my red cheeks slick with
tears that freeze
before I can follow them upstream
and dam the corners of my eyes.
I'm sorry I crumple
and can't stop apologizing.
They'll tell you love is
hard work, but
nothing of the weight of fear
hanging over the time
we spend apart
and woven into words I want
you to say but you
don't.
I'm sorry, sweetheart,
I'm a writer and a pessimist
reflexively narrating
everything unspoken between us and
I don't know if it's your fault
or my fault
or neither or both
that I flinch at uncertainty, expecting
it to strike me in the most painful way:
when the fear is as bad as the thing itself,
it can't really get any worse, can it?
The scariest part is the
maybe.
Maybe there is
no such thing as enough
no such thing as certainty
that it will be okay,
that you love me,
when I've lost
what it feels like
to love myself.

I wore you with hope on my chest
and all you could ever give me
was the naked, baleful weight
of your own self-importance
and in the end, it crushed me.

in the night sky,
the way the crest of the moon seems to kiss
Venus; how you’d never know they were
miles apart.
I see us
in the morning fog,
the way the clouds brush the dewy
grass, how they don’t know they’re supposed to be
in the sky - or don’t care.
I see us
in old couples
pacing the beach after crowds trickle home,
filled with conversation,
still learning about each other after decades
together.
I see us
in the
air between my fingers,
always moving, always there.
I see us
in pairs of teardrops descending
imperfectly from my eyes,
falling together
hurting together
turning to mist and
returning to the sky.
I see us everywhere beautiful and chaotic and
tragic, and
I want it all.

Of course I cry into the hollow
space between my stomach and happy
there is little else I can do.
Don't pretend to understand how it aches when I breathe
you, who have trained your tongue to do
what it should
do not let it curse the smoke stuck to mine; I
know the contempt in your eyes better than I
know my own reflection.

in the
dry air between
the beauty of poetry
and one too many
poetic licenses.

and suddenly we are two
acquaintances who don't know how
to have a conversation
walking four feet apart
back to where we had our first date.