i've missed the opportunity and that's something i'll have to live in
the windows never open in my bedroom and the draft is something your not familiar with
but let me tell you about ghosts and how i haunt them
about how your elbow and your hands still wake me up in the junes you don't make it to connecticut
someday i'll write about the diner and the star bits
some day we'll reply like four days of missing each other is equivalent
to heartbreak or maybe that too
is a window shut tight cause the screen is loose
and who knows what'll get in
or out
if left unattended

someday i will have something worthwhile to say that doesn’t involved ghosts or boats or coasts i’d either die to see or died before reaching.
someday the sun will just be the sun and the moon will just be the ruler of the tides and i won’t be here to tell you what they mean to me in regards to what you mean to me
but the bees will still recognize faces and honey is still too sweet for my tastes and whatever path we take to or from haunted places, hollow and harrowed spaces,
i would rather sit in silence with you than continue to say any of it.

do you still miss me
in the static of days gone silent?

i remember exactly
when everyday conversations faded into weekends.
the first time you were absent
for a four day trip;
those days longer than the weeks,
than the silences that now stretch
between sunrise and sunset.

i was right to say it,
i’d never not love you again,
the day that we met.
there is just no way to translate that
into something palatable enough for infrequent,
casual conversation.
brave as a noun too big for me to possess,
to talk about it.

i don't know what to do with it
the fact that with you, is the last time i slept a night through to the morning
and that when i need help from you i am not afraid of asking
and that i had a dream about us in new york city
and that i keeping thinking it should be me
that it will eventually be us
that you should let me take pictures of you sleeping and awake and maybe everyone else would stop raising their brows when you mention i'm in the passenger seat of your car and instead smile because they all saw us coming years before we really talked about it

i had been cutting paper flowers for hours in your basement
you'll never have a real tree in december — don't like the idea of buying something dead for the purpose of decoration
i could sacrifice the smell of pine for a lack of pining
please don't let me continue to feel this way if all i'll do is wait
i don't know if the situation will ever change
if it was ever to blame in the first place
and it's okay to tell me you're uninterested if it means we can still be friends;
the only way i will ever leave on you
is if you ask me to

i'm tired of talking too much about everything
how all i can think about is your hand in my hand, falling asleep
all the last years and their unreplicable, fleeting possibilities

and my apologies, truly
if my teeth are too sharp; if your skin was unwilling
for how many apples we ate instead of peaches
how many poems i wrote out of bitterness
for the trauma of childhoods we haven't learned to live with
that i place too much blame on my situation
that we write each other into poetry and compare the wounds by the words without having to let them loose privately or censor them
so we vape about it? shake about it? unsubscribe from tweets about it?  
talk only about how all roads lead me to your street because i only know how to get home from east to east.

forty five minutes until midnight
the year will end and with it begin again, another tally at the end of a signed this date document
it is the cusp between death and fool which have always been me and you,
dying out to start again, skirting around the tower to look for the world we want behind it
maybe in the new year you won't have to do for me again what you tried to in the last
but no resolution is going to change our fundmental states of being
magician or not, the year will die
the tides will change
the date will climb higher and higher toward an infinity we won't get to see but pretend to understand
you will still be you
and i will still be me
twenty five minutes is not enough time to unpack all of that
i hope in 2019 he still coughs when he takes the first drag