i remember what it was
to not only be
but to feel loved
by her
and him
and them.
i remember what it was
not to have any doubt
and the exact moment
when i was given it.

the current ache in my chest has been tweeting about wanting a wedding without the marriage and the potential of breaking off an engagement that hasn't happened yet and the apocalyptic sunset i almost married sent me a goodbye by way of google document in the middle of june, unintentionally near our last anniversary, the week before my first love zoom called to say she proposed to her boyfriend, on the beach i almost traveled across the country by train to get to when i was 14 and none of it means anything but it's still keeping me up well into the 2:22 and 5:55 mornings of early july

the same day as the last date listed
the same name on my legal documents
the same bed, same room, same ugly carpet
same fear, same dream, same empty hall closet
but no more window
i can't see the street from here

things keep moving behind my back oh and i'm so happy that they
keep going off and meeting people i've never met and keep going places i'll never get
keep leaving me here, circumstance

still writing
still making music
still trying my best
still waiting for the same person to turn around and pick me instead
still sitting
still running in the mornings above freezing, still trying to forget
still home in connecticut
still breathing !

(still re-reading that google doc)
still thinking about it
still wondering if i died who would get the message

it's not this timeline
i just want you to know i love you more than anything

do you hold yourself accountable to the things that you say?
do you wish for the words you give away to come back
    or to seep in, deep, take root, split open the heart they've grown in?
do you know what a favourite person is?
do you mean it or are you trying to keep me firmly planted?

the world started ending, really truly
and i still only wanted the one thing
to mean more than something useless
to be a better person than someone who wants to mean more than something useless
to hold your hand
to know what it'd be like to kiss you just west of the left cheek

a peach, a plum, a kneecap with teeth marks
a canceled concert in april, a canceled date in august
a new boyfriend, an unforgettable romance

today the stars told me
not to say anything
no, they said, not to say "i love you" unless i meant it
what else is there to say?

no one is over their respective it
not you, or me, or the current him

i wish it was just me, too
you don't even need to ask
i would have checked the attic for you
when will we have time to unpack all that?

sometimes i worry about the places i would go
if i had a car, if gas was cheaper
if time and circumstances finally differ
if you had a window i could toss rocks at gently,
whispering your name where others have tapped and screamed
why don't neighbors ever call the police when its necessary?
the fire burns in the backyard and the streetlight flickers in the front
and we sit or stand or scream in between the front door and the car
sometimes i worry about the places i can't get to

and the beats between your breaths on the telephone
        as you fall asleep
and the way you treat me
        the next morning as if i didn't sing the lullaby at your request
and the silence
        that stretches between us until you need comfort
and how i can't ask for anything
        because i hurt you, once
and how i can't talk about how you're the one that ended it

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

there are ghosts in the walls
i hear them meeting in the crawl space
skittering around, slipping and sliding and falling from the ceiling down, down, down
the whisper of voices and ringing of sounds in the hallway

they say it’s not a haunted room, the ghosts, i mean;
they do not exist,
it must be common creatures that loom
in my walls, in my halls, in my room,
mice and mold playing tricky mind games behind the scenes,
it must be

i ask them this,
isn't it all the same -
if i can't see it for what it is?

what respect do i owe to my elders if they cannot afford me any?
who i am is not a choice but to do right by me,
as another human being, is.
i do not pretend to know the horrors of lives that i have not lived
but i have lived my horrors daily, in the face of ignorance and erasure already, at twenty-three.
do not expect me to stay silent when it is my existence on the table.
those days are over.

i woke up bitter at six am
it was a saturday i could’ve spent sleeping in

well i didn’t ask you to wait for me
but you could have waited a little longer than two ******* weeks

we aren’t transcendent but you had me believe
that this wouldn’t end with staying friends -
you know i think we’d have to die to succeed,
that’s my bad, i’ll confess, i should’ve have known better the day you told me you lie about the colour red

i’m just being honest, like i said i would
i mean you said it too but you’re also a poet who said waxing poetic was something you couldn’t do

darling, leave me if you want to
even if together only ever saw us as being two half truths
i don’t hold it against you - but yes i ******* do
i said no promises and you promised this was everything to you

I want to be so full of stories that the ink runs out, that the pages are stained with the frantic, diagonal scrawl of trying to get it all down.

I want to live a life filled to the brim with so many stories that i become the entire nonfiction section of your local library, the one with the chairs in the windows where the sun keeps the carpet warm; the tattered spine of a favourite novel.

I want you to tear the pages out of me and pin them to your wall, ripe with your thoughts scribbled in the margins.

I don’t want to die. Not yet.

I am watching the other lanes of the highway knowing each car holds a person like the hardcover version of a biography; I am grasping at mere glimpses of a single page, too far away to make out any of the words and I don't want us to be that way.

I want to know you like the back of my hand and still sigh with relief at the coolness of your breath on my neck like a summer breeze when the weather is too hot.

Let me make maps of your freckles and connect the dots with my fingertips until the palms of my hands have memorized the atlas of your body like the lyrics to that one song everyone somehow knows how to sing along.

Let me get a few things wrong
and be patient with me for I am still learning how to be human,
but know, that in all my silence and closed covers, I want.

ask a poet what it's like to read verses write a poem
ask a writer what it's like to have an idea verses what it takes to put it down
ask a failure what it's like to fail themselves verses everyone they know
ask what the difference is

between a self proclaimed title and the one stitched on the label by those who think they know a person
between stuttering because you can't find the word and the purpose of your repetition
between regular anxiousness and feeling as if the world might end
between what it means to be heard verses someone who claims to listen

between how hard you fall after a success you don't deserve and
how hard you fall in love with people who don't put in the work
when a blank page is exciting verses exhausted
when sleep comes so easy the inside of your eyelids feel like a relief and when sleep is a slippery beast, refusing to settle down for anything and when sleep is a restful / restless blink, night and then morning so fast you forget that you're not still living in 2003, 2011, 2014 and

when the world has changed
and the word has changed
and 2018 still doesn't seem to make a difference

ask for a stream of consciousness
and then actually listen

like peeling back the skin of your chest to examine the damage
pulling out push pins from underneath nail beds, listen
like running outside in the misty morning unable to draw a breath in, listen
like finally pulling a breath in, pushing it out again, listen
like the taste of the air on a perfect evening, listen
like the way the moonlight kisses the ocean as waves rise to meet it

there are sparrows painted on the walls of a house we don't own yet
less than two of them, more than a few of them
searching.
flames eat their way in from the outside, siding, floor boards
sighing.
someone left the door unlocked to a balcony, all my things are left exposed to the open windows, boxes piled in the middle of
rooms.
they might be ravens, or crows - the birds, i mean. dim lighting lends to an easy disguise and i haven't been paying enough attention
probably.
i don't even think this house has a balcony.

i wrote this lying on my back,
sweating honesty, crying honestly,
trying to feel alive,
i read it back after the feeling had passed,
in heady disbelief, crying for relief,
always forgetting how bad the bad gets
once the good comes back:

don’t rush — everyone dies —
but don’t hesitate,
please,
you have so little time.

you have so little time.

screaming with my jaw snapped shut,
itching to peel my skin back
and let my bones air out.

nothing feels clean,
even when a room is empty.

i’ve been sitting in the dark for a while now,
staring at the too bright glow of a computer screen,
watching a small bug crawl across the only light source it can find
and wondering
what it must be like to be close enough
to touch the only thing in a room i’m attracted to;
what it would be like to be in a room with a light like you.

all my messages are notifications cleared
without being read,
my whole heart is offered though already
being borrowed and begged by friends
i haven't even had the audacity to call back.

i am tired of receiving without anything to give but a heart,
wholly but more than whole
and still not enough.

know, please, days like today i think i am not suited—
maybe for anything,
much less love, to love, to be loved.

what's more,
the exhaustion of
giving my whole heart has never proved to be enough;
feeling i might always be destined to give too much for nothing
while receiving too much with nothing to give but a heart.

there is no space in your life that i can fit into anymore
and that’s okay
but i still hope you think of me some times;
i hope you still hold onto the happier memories,
the softer things, fondly;
i hope it’s still not too much to ask
that you remember that even though i don’t now, i did —
i did have a place.

It's been getting warmer again lately
even though the daylight hours are shrinking and the nights dip cooler like a thinly veiled warning
from the planet that its end is getting closer.

I keep longing for last January when the new year ate my pain with cold mornings ; quieter days when deliberate silence turned into forgetting how to start a conversation in the first place.
At least I was doing things for me back then.

The last six months it seems like I haven't done anything.
I can't remember why I do anything anyway.
There's no motivation to keep on and purpose is not a thing that exists within me.
I am just tired of being, of getting warmer.

The world is ending,
literally shaking itself apart because nobody listens to warning signs until it's too late to do anything.
I'm not trying to say that my importance is the same because the apocalypse will **** everything and any loss I leave behind is so small looking at it that way —
but I am still shaking myself apart and nobody has been listening to the warning signs.

I have not been quiet about them.
There is no thin veil for a hurricane ;
no way not to see a whole city aflame.

The storms are getting stronger.
Houses were not built for homes.
The nights are cold and the days are getting warmer.

sunlight steams through a sliver where my curtains don’t quite cover the window; illuminates the top corner of a dresser that may or may not be haunted.

i miss you in inconceivable fashion, wearing the sweater you last held me in. the nights are long but the stars aren’t any brighter.

a text message from a boy on a train heading away from the east coast

i saw the great lakes today
you should have come with me
seattle is beautiful
i know you've always wanted to get away

a phone call from a boy before he called his girlfriend and tried to die

i always thought it was fate to have met you
that i really did love you more than i had any right to
i'll miss you
no it's a goodnight not a goodbye

a run in with a boy at an apple orchard, there were scars on his throat

i'm sorry
how is she?
i really do miss you
good luck with everything

sometimes i lie aloud,
about me, to myself;
knowing full why, who it’s about.
sometimes i pin my hair to the top of my crown
underneath is more lost, less found.
sometimes i place my fingers to my bones -
wonder how a face becomes a house -
when it starts to feel like a home.
sometimes i debate just cutting half to self-preservate,
pretend it’s all considered the same.

snow has melted from your front yard
chocolate hovers warm, still baking;
sweets for parties i am not invited to.

i am cold suddenly and all at once
in places the outside air doesn’t reach.

the laughter of hello, proof of living
just opposite my corner table;
i am noticed but not spoken to.

i thought they said winter
was for the death of things.

wake up and keep telling yourself that you’re over it
that it doesn’t matter if they hate the rain but moved to england
because that was almost a year ago and we’re okay now
they moved back home anyway

wake up and keep telling yourself that you’re over it
that it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t answer your messages
because it was your fault for ending it in the first place
you wanted him to be happy, remember that

wake up and keep telling yourself that you’re over it
that it doesn’t matter if there are scars on feet from false affection
because there’s a difference between love and ownership
you know better now

wake up and keep telling yourself that you’re over it
that it doesn’t matter if you fell too far, too fast and ran away
because you aren’t always going to be so scared
someday you will stand still without looking backward

some times the pain is exquisite -
beautiful and blinding ;
the kind of soreness that comes from hard work
and rough love
and aches good the next day.
some times the pain is harsh -
temperamental and overwhelming ;
the heat of bruised and broken skin
the kind that comes from a body trying too hard to heal.
some times the pain is indescribable -
everything and everywhere ;
numbing with seemingly no reason for appearance.
some times
the pain is just pain.

It was one of those nights.

A night like just ripe strawberries
with a sprinkle of unneeded sugar melting over the top;
the knowledge that eating these berries would taste as sweet as kissing the person they’re shared with.
Maybe even sweeter.

A night just the side of warm
where a glimmer-sheen of sweat hangs onto the places between elbows and knees;
shirt backs stick to lower ones - but it smells so good outside, like summer
even though it was only May.

A night that held two years ago against two years from now
and came up without wanting;
past was memory, future was possibility,
everything in the middle was one of those nights.

Beautiful between midnight
and lonely again by four in the morning.

do you ever sit beside someone
and the rest of the world goes quiet
or maybe that’s not quite the truth
the rest of the world falls into to chaos;
stir crazy,
violent storms of
should have and would never
and can’t now and won’t ever
and could possibly, probably can, maybe —
but your head goes quiet
and you wish you could just pretend for a second
that you are someone different and it wouldn’t mean as much
from your hands and your lips and your eyes or your mouth
and maybe someday the right words will come out
and all that fades into nothingness with swing back around
and mornings won’t feel gray until the sun comes out
and running won’t be away forever
but to some place in between then and now

do you ever just sit beside someone
and not know what to do with your hands
but wish they belonged to someone braver;
that you were a self-made man
and do you understand —
that you gave up too much of yourself to survive the hands of a lesser man
but the press of this one’s shoulder is more than you told her you wanted
but you wanted it

you took a strip of film out of your camera in broad daylight
and sighed so softly at the light corruption
you said it was to remind me
something ruined could still be beautiful

and i loved you so fiercely
in that moment, just for trying to apologize
that i accepted the gift instead of saying
(what i really wanted was for you to tell me)
i wasn't ruined in the first place

well here i am again, sleepless.
it’s 1:42 in the morning.
at this rate i will have shivered myself into a cold
before the sun comes up
but instead of putting on a sweater,
i am drinking watered down grape juice wishing it was wine
and wondering where the hell you’ve been that another week of silence has gone by
and if you’ll ever stop doing this to me
or if i’ll ever stop letting you.

next time you say you can handle all of my crazy,
baby, make sure you have a vacuum

for all of the lazy, broken pieces of those same words said before,
that have been smashed and smeared into my **** carpet,
so you don’t cut your feet walking backwards out the front door.

next time you say you can handle all of my crazy,
maybe make sure you have a vacuum

because my hair sheds like it’s perpetually ridding me of thick coated winters,
and leaving behind a shrine to our time together like forget-me-nots
so you will find pieces of me everywhere -
not just in the carpet, the bed sheets, the backseats,
but on the radio:
if not because my voice is still etched into your mind during the static silence
then because i knew the words to every song like i wrote them all,
and i wrote a lot of them about you, or people like you:
the previous liars and triers and vacuums.

next time you say you can handle all of my crazy,
remember space is a vacuum

and how you also said we are two stars intertwined
because we are not celestial beings but soft bodies destined to die,
oxygen deprived, with ruptured lungs in ten seconds time.

most of the time i'm outside my body
looking for ways to climb back in
between the spaces of my ribs
where the metaphorical heart lives
and i can't see anything that isn't physical
only the tangible touch is lived

and then i come crashing back inside my body
white hot pain in a burnt fingertip that touches a hot stove lid,
an hour drive to a not-too-far away place, ocean waves
a clear night and too many stars to connect with naked eyes
two full lungs and an even, heady heart pace

the moment never fails to fade;
leave me looking to claw back out my body,
a feeling close to enraged, closer to bitter some days;
desperate to tear back my skin if it means escape
until i'm outside my body again
looking for ways to climb back in

It is not the end of the world.
You were not meant to be on that spaceship.
You were not meant to be there for the departure in the first place.
It would be too hard to watch him go, you had said.
He wouldn’t be able to go through with it if you were there, he had said.
You bid your farewells early, (yesterday) like you’d both agreed.
You already made your promises to keep an eye out for his mother, his sister, his nephew, the old high school volleyball team.
It should not matter that you didn’t see the physical vessel leave the planet.
You didn’t want to watch him go upward and onward to join the aliens just like he’d said he wanted (when you were five and bleary eyed, in the dim light of the television, a documentary about mars, when you both should have been sleeping).
You ran the whole way there, anyway.
You are late—you are always too late—but you can still see the trail of smoke, twisting up up up fading into the blue blue blue of the atmosphere as man made increments of time put distance between you.
The earth stays rightfully on it’s axis, spinning though you cannot feel it.
You tell yourself it is better this way.
You know it’s a lie.
You think you should have followed him, fear of the unknown be ******.
It is not the end of the world, oh, but (by all the stars in the universe) he was yours.

I wasn’t put on this earth to love you, but I want to
I am tilting; head back to the stars, already dead, screaming:
I want to, I want to, I want to!
and my head turns to my heart and says:
'please stop, you’re scaring me!'
and my heart turns back to my head and says:
'scared? you should be, but it will be good, so good, so ******* worth everything'.

I wasn’t constructed with a purpose,
I was born human and all I was made for is this:
to live, to die, to briefly exist.
That's all there is. This is it.
But there you are, something more,
vaguely magnificent in a way humans haven't made words for
and I want it, I want it, I want it.

I wasn’t made with any know how;
I'm not even a bit decent at being a person
and I have only grown to know who that person is, not how to be it
not properly, not today with the way the world is
but I want, and I want, and I want:

to go to the beach when it rains
and to write a thousand confession letters
and to sit in the quiet with your hand around my ankle
and to dance around a living room to a song I showed you
and to cry over things I could never explain
and to be in the same place as you, at a different time
and to be in the same place as you, nearly all the time
and to know it wasn’t fate but that’s okay
and to not be afraid
and to lean into you
and to love, afraid or not
and to thank all the dead stars, and possible gods and half truths for making me human at the same time as you
and you
and you
and you
and you
and you

you don’t feel it anymore
it is not fair to cry liar in the face of modesty
humor me, irony,
that the novelty of loving me hasn’t yet faded
yet here we are, both jaded by lack of communication
we are numbed,
neither of us notice the ghostly touch of distant thumbs
as they prey on rain kissed cheeks,
these secrets we still keep,
the summer heat that steeped in has long since seeped back out,
a wanderer.
today was the day i finally died
and it felt like nothing.

you proclaim that every day has me :
engraved into the darkness of your eyelids,
pressing against the inside of your skull ;
that you can’t ever, not even for a second, forget
and i wonder if you are lying
because if that’s true,
then that means your weeks of silence
are made of intentional ignorance,
knowing that i have burning imprints of you :
trapped in my lungs,
making a staircase of my rib cage,
just out of place like a cool sweat in a heat wave.
my fingers are still cold and hands still shake at the idea
that you left the refrigerator open on purpose
because you had no intention of keeping me warm.

i should have known
when you told me
that i was a celestial body
and you favour the sun

i should have known
when you said my name
the same way you said moon

i should have known
when you marveled at supernovas
the same way you marveled at me

i should have known
when you told me
that space ***** you up
and i made you undone

It is a nearly Wednesday morning and
I am so ******.

the thing is i’m exhausted all the time and i’m down right tired of it, and of how it somehow seems to correspond directly with how frequently you’re on my mind.

we don’t talk anymore is a sentence sending a plague of chills down my spine; a sentence that has long since been plaguing my mind, throwing handfuls of cheap words to empty lines.

i am wary, wandering around under the weight of something we never quite were, as it hangs ever heavier on this set of shoulders the months pass in blurs.

i have the most painful urge to dance
specifically all around the room
specifically on cold wooden floors, sock footed
specifically with you
perhaps with the lights off
and light up stars on the ceiling
you see, i have been making a playlist
(of all the songs i want to dance to with you
at 449 songs, it would take us 1.2 days to listen)
please don’t ask me about it
or what I want to come out of it
because I want more than I am allowed to
and there is no way that I could pick and choose
which of those things to tell you
but if I had to pick a single thing to ask for, from you
it would be for one day, full:
(a morning coffee, a long car ride, a foreign coast, something read aloud to me, the press of two shoulders, two palms, maybe a handwritten poem left behind by a ghost, a smile, a sunlit floor, an afternoon dancing until the glow of the sunset fades into evening and a night under two sets of stars, one plastic, and one infinite, no goodbyes)
just a goodnight, and a good morning.

you are sitting in the passenger seat
trees are whispers, street signs are ghosts
dark houses sleep outside the windows
there are so many people you don’t know
but there is one, comfortable as home
who still makes you split yourself open;
willing to offer all your internal organs
not just the ones your chest hosts
and it is the first time in so long
that the world stands still