you, my love, are the light of my life, and you - are ruining my writing. lately, when i sit down and try to write, all i can seem to come up with are grossly overused analogies and tired metaphors that have been recycled a thousand different times. all that flows from the end of my pen are flowers and stars and the creases that form in your forehead when you smile and how much i'd like to lose myself in the galaxies of your irises - and it's disgusting. this twilight-esque prose, this juvenile symbolism and puppy-love poetry that pours from me - is not me. i'm no Poe, no Plath, no Kerouac, but i like to think that i'm okay. however, recently the caliber of my writing has been reduced to nothing more than rainy-day romance and child's play. and god, everything rhymes. i feel like i'm sixteen again in the best way. it's because you've stayed, that you are changing everything i thought i knew about love. i catch myself absentmindedly drifting to visions of a shoebox apartment in a city somewhere and furniture shopping and even the B word (babies). that's so unlike me, that is so - amazing because nobody has ever been so serious about me and i think that maybe, baby,  someday i'd like to be 80 with you - oh god. you - you are too many poems that all sound the same, but each time i read through them i somehow manage to find something i haven't read before. you are open doors and patient arms with a voice like a lullaby that resonates in the darkest corners of my mind. you are saving grace without condition and a love so deep i could go for a swim in it - and maybe that's why i'm drowning, because all i ever really learned how to do is doggy-paddle. but you are so patient. anyone else would have quit on me by now. the idea of forever has always terrified me, but the promises you make sound so real that i'm beginning to think maybe they are. baby, you, are eyes like soil and words made of rain drops, and every day we grow a little more. i adore you. i am so sorry that my meager words can't do you justice. my ineptitude is criminal, but i'm trying. and i think that i would rather be vomiting these clichés than return to the world of gray i lived in before i met you. i love you. i love you. i love you to the moon and back and every planet in between. you are the sweet to my tea and the leaves to my tree. and every song i've yet to hear but somehow i manage to follow along with. i wanna scream it from the top of a mountain or the middle of a grocery store, about this love that leaves me with butterflies in my belly and fireworks in my heart. baby, i've never been so happy to embrace mediocrity. my prose may be suffering, but my heart is soaring. writer's block has never been more welcome than when it bears your name. so wipe your feet at the door, take off your coat, and please, make yourself at home.

- m.f.

The year is 2095.
Religion is black and gold.
Reciting prayers are now the only way you can sleep, and all the conversations you had with others that never involved moving your mouth,
and I believe people smoke cigarettes because there is a salvation in being able to stop parts of you from growing that do not know how to do anything else. It occurred to me that we make everything before we even see it, and that is how extensive beauty spreads, it exists without acknowledgement, yet it is always there.

I woke up without my senses, not knowing the flavor of the string which holds these
linnens afloat on the laundry
of life's backyard, but I know it was where it was supposed to be, as most things are.
I do not believe in phantoms but I believe that when asking questions, there is always a response.
The world answers you back every time, and although
I have yet to understand the dust found between its proverbs that
I assume was beaten out of old rugs and woven from cobwebs.
What else is there?
I am constantly torn between being lost and being alive and looking for the difference.
Constantly torn between loving where you live, and trying to become
I found so many ways to be, that I never spent the time looking for ways to understand.