You made a poet fall in love with you
And expected her not to write sonnets about your eyes
Haikus about the way you kissed her in the moonlight
Expected the fire in her heart not to inspire couplets
You made a poet fall in love with you, and when you left
Expected her not to write pages about the ache in her chest
Write a soliloquy dedicated to her tears
Expected her not to feel every gut wrenching moment of the pen hitting paper like your words hit her in the most vulnerable places of her mind.
You made a poet fall in love with you, and you expected her to be silent.
That is no fault of hers.

because i believed you
because i never realized how brown your eyes really were until i had the courage to stare
because you told me you were happier this way
because i don't feel suicidal when i'm with you
because you wanted me to meet your mother
because you never ask me what's wrong
because you don't care about anything
because i wanted to know what would happen
because i was too scared to ask
because ******* for leaving the first time
because i love you for coming back
because you only ever touch me when you're drunk
because his lips didn't feel like yours
because he made me laugh but not the way you could
because of 3 am nights with you are all i want to remember
because 3 am nights without you sit in the middle of my chest like a boulder
because my father warned me
because i can't do it anymore
because i can't do it anymore

he’s interested in disasters,
the kind of catastrophes that the media has a field day with,
the kind of accidental atrocities that are awe-inspiring in their horrid glory,
the kind of things that have self destructed spectacularly – so much so that the remaining debris becomes a masterpiece on the ocean floor, a memorial for beautified trauma.

and I guess that’s why he’s interested in me.

i can still feel his hands around my neck.
the fingers like words and “i don’t love you” and it stings although he wasn’t the first to say it, i can’t breathe.
she haunts our hallways, our floorboards are cracking
beneath our feet, our home is crumbling
between our fingertips and
i can feel her weight on my chest. sometimes
i think that she should just go by the way that her footsteps echo after she’s gone. i remember
a wall full of holes from where his fists
kissed ever so gently.
i think that wall is what my heart might look like but lately
i’ve had trouble finding my pulse.
i can still feel his hands around my neck.
does he know
why i can’t look him in the eye? does he
know
the blue makes me feel like I’ve swallowed too much water, does he know i can’t breathe?
i think I’m still trying to understand why
beautiful things die in my fingertips and why he stomps on every rooting bulb my wilting body tries to plant, why he ripped my roots from beneath my feet and why my hair started to fall out why
he put his hands on my throat and how i still feel them there.
has he figured it out?
does he know that lemon scented bleach would taste better than
her on his lips and the *******
they splatter?
i can still feel his hands around my neck.
i was born into light, into pain, into love and
he wasn’t the first man to leave a mark on my body and i feel like he is the works with the universe to watch me fall
things fall and shatter without you touching them, things break while you’re sleeping and
everything about him and her stings like saltwater and everything about me
bends for him like light.
i can still feel his hands around my ******* neck.
he crashed into her hips like his hands to my bones, like fists to walls, the walls
rattled, my ribcage
rattled, he was
rattled and i can still feel his hands around my neck,
pushing, like me trying to ******* make this work.
what is this?
his hands are like ghosts around my throat,
the memory of her wrapped around his body instead of me
wrapping, holding in place
icanstillfeelhisfuckinghandsaroundmyfuckingneck
i am not stupid you know.
i can only see that he moves like these words write themselves, and he
speaks like music bleeding through a closed window,
i swear, i am still cracked
though i still have tattoos left from the tips of his fingers from those heavy-handed nights,
i swear, they didn’t even sting.

i am laying on a bed once familiar to me
i feel empty
in a strange, acquainted kind of way
i am clutching fistfuls of sheets and broken dreams
and the storm rolls in
i am under a roof but
i swear i can feel the rain
it has been like this for a while now
but i have not grown accustomed to
the hollowness in my chest
and every breath feels like
blood is pumping through my body
and it is not my own
i am laying on a bed once familiar to me
and i wonder if I will ever feel whole
again
i am whispering secrets to my walls
and my floorboards start to sweat
because every story ends with "i still
feel like this"
and i do not know
if i will ever stop

people tell me i’m
lucky because at least i lost
him knowing that he
loved me, at least it wasn’t as painful as a
breakup. if this isn’t
pain then please tell me words for this swallowing
wound in the middle of my
chest, explain how i can’t find my own
hands even in broad
daylight and every time i think i
see him around our
house i know to take it as a
sign that i need to call my shrink back up, tell her
about the ghost at the core of my
life.

i can still feel his
hands in mine, long pianist man
fingers and encompassing
palms, wide open like a
map soaked in
blood.

he was so long
gone by the time that they
found him, his own fragile
mother couldn’t identify the
body, i was the only
one who knew how my hands were supposed to fit his
hips, the only good part of him
left.

my doctor tells me that i’ve passed the threshold for
grief, this isn’t healthy, she
tells me. how am i expected to know the meaning of that
word when the only thing i can
explain is the incessant ringing in my
ear, the sound of the
bullet that went farther than i ever
dared.

we were supposed to get
married, he just didn’t have the
money, but he gave me everything else off his very own
back. at night i stay up repeating the names of the
children we were going to
have, all three of
them. now they seem like more of an
insult to the holy
trinity.

god, how did you feel when satan
fell? i demand you on your
knees, begging me to
believe in you again. do you know how it feels to be in love with a
ghost?