after all this time, all I really
know about you
is that you put on eyeliner
in remarkably straight lines,
that you drink your coffee
black every other morning,
that you don't like flowers
because they remind you
of how beautiful things
never last long enough.

all I know is the scent of
your perfume and the way
it lingers on my pillow,
the way you cry when films
have happy endings, what
you talk about in your sleep,
how you always read the
newspaper upside down.


ask me if I love you and
I'll tell you "I don't know":
but I know I love those
little things about you.

The definition of anxiety:
Me, Myself, and I.

It Starts
when he carves a home into your heart,
shoots a bullet between your ears
and scratches his name under your eyelids.
he controls you, he is on top,
and you are nothing but the cheap *****
and five dollar cigarettes you taste like.
and again again again he will whisper
‘i love you i love you iloveyou’
like he is promising the world.
you know he’s only promising another bruise
right on your nerves,
and another night spent anything but alone.
no matter how hard you try to
push him
out.

And Then
after a while, you lose yourself
like you did before,
when you weren’t black and blue.
you promise yourself better
while you let the bad leak out
and drink your own good in.
every time you try to let him out,
and make everything scar over,
somehow he gets back in, but deeper.
in deeper than the bullet between your eyes,
the knife between your veins,
the cracks in your mirror.
and it stings more than the
spiderweb gashes on the backs
of your
hands.

In The End
you will beg and plead and scream
‘i love you i love you iloveyou’
again and again and ‘again’.
he’ll lose his nerve like you lost your breath,
‘again please again’ like you lost your heart,
‘please god just one more time’
like you
lost
your
mind.

he is shimmering, and genial, and made from lego bricks
wraps my fog into empty nothingness
gives me his hand when i fall
all in dust and memories
he's my kiss of undeath
darkness falls apart

had a hope to sink in the sea of gently swinging hammocks

his seasons confuse me,
sitting cross legged inside of a dragon
that falls asleep in shallow oceans for so long
until people forget and believe its an island,
and build tiny houses and towns along his dragon scaled shores

You haven’t touched me
in ninety-one days. I don’t
know how to tell you.

I haven’t seen your
face in twenty-six days but
it does not miss me.

I’m not allowed to
say I need you so I’ll say
this instead. I care.

I do think I love
you. I don’t think it’s enough.
But I still read the

notes you wrote me. I
still trace your signature with
my eyes. You should know

the spider of your
handwriting still crawls into
my heart late at night.

I haven’t called you
crying in four hundred and
fifty-seven days.

I had not written
you a poem like this for four
hundred fifty-eight.

I am sorry about the letters I wrote you
in red ink, the swells and valleys
of your body that I never
learned to love.
I am sorry for making you a war zone,
for the carnage and the crime,
the cruel topography of the boot prints I
left inside of your skull.

Especially those. You see, I was taught how to
choke the things I love
with fists stained blue and bleeding,
to shake till they are limp as a rag doll
and cry over their prone form,
but never how to touch the planes of your face
without leaving frost on your wings,
ice behind the shutters of your eyes.

I’m sorry for all the time you spent
tending the garden of your sorrow,
I’m sorry that your tears
didn’t help the flowers bloom. I’m sorry that
the bathroom mirror knows you best
wild-eyed at 2 am, asking it ragged and heartsore
who will love me now. who could
love me.

I’m sorry that when I say I’m trying to be better
it sounds like an apology for not being good enough.
I’m sorry that there are days when your poems
read like grocery lists of all the lies
I told you when you cried.  

Forgive me.
I’m sorry we never learned how to
fall into and not through,
sorry the slopes of the letters in the words
we speak aren’t the bridges we mean
them as.

I’m sorry I buried you under the couch
in that therapist’s office. your tears were
saltwater I couldn’t allow myself to drink.
I lived on a desert island
and could not permit myself the
pleasure of a mirage.

I’m sorry that I never believed you could be
someone I could understand.

I’m sorry that you’ve spent so much
time looking for someone to
love you.
I’m sorry it couldn’t be me.