I never was one for autobiographies, and to be honest, I couldn’t tell you a thing about me. So instead I’ll tell you what’s inside of me, I’ll trace for you the outline of my soul, you just have to promise you’ll do the same for me someday, I want to know everything there is to know about yours, as it is the other half to my own. For as long as I remember, I swore I wasn’t human, humans are so frivolous at times and I swore I was some consequence birthed out of some fit of passion. What I’m trying to say, I suppose, is that the world was too sensitive for my liking, I burned everything I touched and carved words into cement walls because the intensity of my soul possessed me like a demon in those biblical stories I couldn’t stand reading. And this fervor made me lonely, though lonely could never even begin to cover it, rather, it made my heart feel like an old stone well and echoes of my past bounced off of it. And after twenty years of the blackness I was on the brink of giving up, and to put it in more simple terms I found poetry in free falling off bridges and envied the deer for their suicide dashes. And in the metaphorical sense you could think of my heart like an old abandoned apartment, the pitter patter of the water droplets that dripped off the ceiling into a bucket, and the radiator, weighed down by rust, would groan and heave during the winter months, there was a moth-eaten mattress in the corner and books toppling over one another in heaping masses, like warfare in the 1800s. And in the plainest of language, the gig was up, I threw in the towel and shook hands with the darkness, I surrender, a triangle trying to conform amongst circles. I was nothing more than a hollow soul, my bones rattled like a dead-beaten cage with the bars all bent and worn. And what I’m trying to say is that the vastness within me could not be described, I would know because I tried, it was all I could write about for years, I had lines beneath my eyes like all the poets, Plath, Bukowski, they were my comrades. And the loneliness was so great that I never saw the sun for months, the fire within me incinerated my every inside to dust. And this was much too drawn out for an introduction, but you’re the only one who deserves this explanation, I want you to understand the gravity of who I was before I tell you who I am, the person I became the moment I set eyes on you. Do you have but a clue of what you are to me? No, I doubt you ever could. What I’m trying to say is that I want to kiss you everywhere it hurts. And who knew, that you’d fall in love with a wildfire, and to think I had spent my whole life trying to extinguish it, when it was everything you wanted. But wanting you doesn’t even begin to cover it, what I mean is that sometimes I feel this swelling within me that would make every ocean recede in admiration, it’s rushing through my fingertips at this very moment with a passionate nature that I never knew existed. And what I’m trying to say is that the day I met you everything changed, I saw the world in all its brilliant colors and all the gray dissipated. And what I’m trying to say is that you healed my splintered bones like glue, you made flowers sprout through my ribcage like a meadow in June, and you sketched stretch marks on every inch of my hollow heart.  Falling in love with you is like coming up for air after a deep sea dive, it’s my heart pounding to its greatest capacity after a marathon and the wind beneath my wings like some sparrow in flight. And ******* I will never begin to scrape the surface of it, but I sure as hell will try, and what I mean by that is that I’ll continue to write to you every day of my life. And there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to run to you, sometimes I find myself halfway out the door, I never feel more alive than when I take you in my arms after a long drive. And that is what I ache for at this very moment, I can almost feel you against me, my fingers through your hair, and to be honest I couldn’t be more surprised that we don’t have bruises from pulling one another closer, because closer in this world is still lightyears away from the close we want to be. And don’t you feel it, my love? Don’t you feel it every time that we make love? Every time I run my fingertips along your spine I’m writing you a poem in a language no one could have ever dreamed of. And sometimes in the middle of it all I find myself clutching at you, and my apologies if I leave claw marks along your shoulder blades, but when you kiss me I can’t tell whose breath is whose and that’s how I know that somehow we’ve left this place. Because darling, perhaps we were not made for the world and the world was made for us, I know because there are more landscapes in your eyes than I can count and who needs the world when there are galaxies in the wells of your collarbones. And I swear these bodies of ours were constructed for one another’s, I can tell by this endless ache, and when I say I miss you I mean that without you I feel like an animal with a missing limb. So if you hear the wolves howling it’s because I told them about you, and if the moon blinds you it’s because I asked her to remind you of the glow you light within me, and if I sound out of breath it’s because I’ve already ran halfway down the street again, hoping that time and space will collapse in awe of the love I have for you, if only just this once. And you wanted me to write you something, well, my love, I’ll write you a poem:

Your skin against my skin
Tangled breaths
Clasped hands.

And if that isn’t poetry than I don’t know what is, all I know is that I spent my life devouring novels and nothing scrapes the surface of what you are, you are worlds that have yet to be discovered that I wish to spend my whole life writing about. And when I say I’d do anything for you I mean that you are everything in this world to me, you are the blue-gray skies and the winter green pines and more than I have ever dreamed about. And I will describe this love if it kills me, but if you’re ever wondering just look into my eyes and that’s how you’ll know, hurricanes and tsunamis and tornados don’t even know what it’s like to have this ardor. And to make a long story short, I thought the world had ******* up somehow, I thought I was in it alone, but now I know I was made for you, and you for me, and no one else. And I can’t even tell you what it feels like to find the other half to your soul, to find a hand that fits perfectly inside your own. And I know I’m a writer, baby, but I swear that we’re extraordinary, even time stops when we make love and only tears can explain what you are to me. And my whole life I watched the waves in awe, I never believed anything could be so relentless, but I learned that the waves crashing over and over is a lot like falling in love with you, one touch, one glance, one thought and I’m falling again
And again
And again
And again

I walked into my empty room and
This was the feeling I was trying
To put into words earlier today,
My fingers tremble over the keys
The way they do over your skin
Because there are no words for that.
But here it is, returning again,
It hit me like a bullet in the back,
A pang that feels like you’ve been
Punched in the stomach,
And you never know when it’s coming.
But I feel you in the clothes that lay sprawled out on
The floor, in the vast expanse
Of your side of the bed,
Coffee and cigarettes used to be my glue
When my heart had as many cracks as a sidewalk,
But you came along and made it brand new,
Oh god, you have.
And here I am, alone again, my fingers
Still aching from clutching you so close,
The spaces between them spelling
Your name in the most ardent cursive,
And I think I won
The race I had with the sky today,
I think my tears fell faster and harder
Than the rain. Forever was just another
Word in the dictionary before you exhaled
It into my mouth, but now it’s
All I can seem to think about,
The feel of our tangled limbs
Our ’I love you’s waltzing together in our kisses,
Not even the force of the world
Could have pulled us apart.
And I could go on,
But all I want you to know is
That I almost turned the car
Around a thousand times,
I got choked up  
As soon as I let you go,
Because leaving you is
So sad that even sadness
Didn’t know how sad it
Could get.
Maybe some day I’ll make sense.
And now the hour’s growing late
And all I crave is the sound
Of your heartbeat,
I feel you in the winter
Trees, every city light that
Passes me by,
But mostly in the throbbing
Of my chest,
I place my hand over
My breast and listen
To its sigh,
‘Her, her, her.’

I am looking at the sky and I can see the vaguest outline of the trees against the night and soon I’ll see the glow of a golden moon but all I know is that I should be looking at it with you. I want to take you to Europe. I want to stop by the Seine and see that moon reflected in the water and I want to feel my hand in yours as I look at you and nothing else. I want to take you to that lock bridge, you know, the one weighed down with all that love. I want to look at a padlock and envy the way it is fastened so tightly around the metal, if only I could be so irrevocably wrapped around you. And while others look up at the Eiffel Tower I want to look at the rust peeling off the railings so effortlessly, and I’ll think of how you did the same for me, how you were the first and last to see the core of who I am and how I wasn’t even afraid. It hurts so bad to want you, these days. I ache for your flesh against mine and your pulse beating in time with my own and how I can never tell whose is whose, and how I know it’s supposed to be that way. Your fingertips, grazing my cheek; I never thought it was possible to miss something so much. I miss the forests in your eyes and getting lost amongst the firs beneath the starriness of the night. It feels as though this ache is eating me alive. I’ve never wanted dawn to come so bad. I want to feel my heart race as every mile brings me closer to you. I want you to look at me in that way you always do, that way that leaves me breathless because in a one second’s glance you look at me with a love that couldn’t even be explained in ten thousand little black journals. I miss looking at you and feeling my mind go blank. Walking down cobblestone streets with you seems much too far away. But I’ll wait for it, just like I have waited for tomorrow, like I have waited to take your face into my hands and kiss you with this feeling that has made every day without you seem like nothing at all. Like I’ve waited for my limbs to become tangled with yours. Is there a better feeling in the world? There never was. I want you. I want you. The wanting you leaves me expressionless staring at a now pitch-black sky. I can’t even see those trees anymore. I can’t even begin to describe to you this ache that is splitting my bones. Sometimes I can’t think of anything to say. How do you begin to tell someone that you never thought it was possible to need something so much? But I do, I do. I need your arms. I need to feel your lips tugging at my own. Like we can’t get close enough. We never can. Sometimes I swear that wanting you is all I am.

I feel like all of this, and you and I and forever is a transcendence that could never be explicated with words. What I’m trying to say is that whenever I try to describe what it feels like to be close to you all I can feel is this swelling within me. And I never thought we were ordinary. No, I knew from the moment I set my eyes on you that I had known you long ago. I’m going to tell you what it was like before you knew me. How I think the people who say you don’t need another person to feel whole never felt the kind of loneliness that constricted me. How all I wanted was to be alone, but it never felt right, like Bukowski said in all the poems. And I tried to cover up the emptiness. I swallowed the sadness with bitter cups of coffee, filled my lungs with long drags of cigarettes that could never satiate me. And good God, the longing within me. I felt like a battered man in the Sahara dying of thirst. I kept looking at the trees for an answer, I kept spilling out long works of prose, trying to rid myself of this demon that ate away at me like fire on paper. And I never knew what he was. The cynics are wrong when they swear you cannot die from lack of love. I thought I needed someone. I kept looking in all the wrong places, I kept kissing the wrong ones, I swore the gods ****** up somehow, because anyone that met me drowned. And I tried to hide it, I did. I tried to mimic others and appear like a shallow river. But I wavered. I overflowed, I flooded the streets, like a split open dam, I felt my heart bleed. I gave up on the transcendental part of me and wrote it off that I was not meant to be here. See, the trouble was I thought I needed someone; but I needed you. And I’m baffled how the world keeps turning, relentless, when you and I are transcendent. And I wonder if you feel it, too. How skin on skin isn’t enough, how I feel alive when you breathe into my mouth, and perhaps I’ve been reading too much Plato, how he talks about separated souls and how they ache to be conjoined with one another. And I do. I know this wasn’t the first lifetime I was meant for you. How the nostalgia that would seep into my skin like poison is part of another eternity. And who knows what we were. Maybe we were sparrows moving against the wind. Maybe this is what happens when a writer becomes enamored, but I know I never knew forever until I felt you all over me, sharing the same space. And maybe one day I can say what I want to say. That I’ll describe, in brilliant colors, the taste of your name. How despite the streetlights and the cars that fly down the road at midnight, we create our own eternity that knows no sense of time. And all the hours we spend apart, I’ll think of when we will return there. Maybe only sadness needs the words. Perhaps I never did. I’ll let this feeling coarse throughout my veins instead, paint you landscapes in my head. Kiss you with the intensity of two colliding stars. And when I breathe forever into your mouth I’ll whisper, “Darling do you feel it?” Because I do, I do, I do.

I tried to write you a poem about last night,
But it’s still so raw in my mind.
I swear to god
When we make love
I can’t speak for fifteen
Days,
I just think of your fingertips
And how they start wildfires
In my chest,
How when you kiss me
I forget how to breathe.
And maybe you just bring
Out this animal in me,
It leaves me clawing at
Your shoulder blades
And biting at your throat,
But then also, I want
You in the gentlest of ways,
My fingertips grazing your
Cheek,
Telling you
I love you
Over and over.
And here I am,
Wanting you
Again.
I want you to know
That I don’t want there to be a
Single inch of your skin
That I haven’t kissed.
So good god,
When you get home
Throw open the door,
Take my face into
Your hands and
Kiss me like you never
Have before.
Kiss my neck
Until missing you
Feels like forever ago,
Leave a poem in my
Mouth for tomorrow’s
Drive home,
Even though it
Won’t feel like home
Without you,
Not at all,
Not at all.
But *******
The missing you
Is back for me again,
It’s looming overhead
Like a thunderstorm
In June.
Don’t let it take me,
Don’t let me lay awake
Waiting for the lightning,
Just hold me until
I forget why thunder
Seems so terrifying,
Make love to me
So the hands of the clock
Can’t catch up
To the beating of our
Hearts,
And in case I haven’t
Told you enough,
I love you,
I love you,
I love you.