How my hubristic heart grows heavy
With the blithering brevity
That is love -
Love how I scorn the very
Mention of the word, the worst word;
One made of tacky two buck cards
And cheap chocolate samplers.
Why love is nothing but absurd!

Tis on the mind of every man,
Burning Life's color til she grows wan
And waxen, my dear lady do not
Let the soft, sweet poppy besot
You - I know it's true face,
A sickly, febricula I fail to efface.

Love, how I abhor the name,
The act duplicitous for all involved,
There are no winners, merely fools
Left to drown in the din of falderal.
**** it to hell, that venomous visage!
I refuse to accept such a curse as love,
How I spit the letters one by one,
With you, fair monster, I am done.

Yet, I cannot seem to help
How much I yearn to stretch taunt
My heart til my love is gaunt,
Fraught with fear and thin with time;
It will be my undoing
All because I can't start shooing
That nuance of a feeling on its way
To ruin some other simpleton's day.

How I love to hate ye,
Are the thoughts that reside
Like a warm body curled beside me.

Sneering at the flicker of fear in my eyes,
You made your way to my side,
You kissed me, your lips stained with lies.
Your blade you raised,
Glinting in the moonlight’s daze,
Slowly swooping down to me,
The air now a crumbling maze.
A mysterious, quiet, cool danger rained down,
But he made a sound,
And into darkness you had grown.

I laid and watched for shadows on the wall,
He laid, scratched my skin,
O’er my neck his tongue crawled,
So tired,
My hope to fall.

‘Ere at the break of dawn,
Uhtceare,
Recalling the cool, iron feel of his fangs,
Mountain stream,
Blue-black, heartbeat,
Fell thirst,
Unexpected my lust, his cold desire.
Wishing for thorned skin,
Torn,
Desire-hate,
Distraction serves evil.
Vengeance I beg hither,
Clasp my heart,
Chase away desire.
                                   -**Firefly

Dear,

A lot has changed in the last year and a half
since the day God decided to scoop you up from our ember-warm hometown
and swallow you whole about sixty years earlier than any of us would have ever prayed for.
We would have all given up our one gold-embellished chance to write the center-spread
ecstatically collected our own blood and sweat and knuckles met with writers-cramps
if that meant watching wrinkles sprout permanently across your forehead
roots of trees burying themselves into the grooves of your smile lines.
We would have sacrificed all that hard-earned pain
that stain issues one through four
and that old putrid-beige colored couch
that we hated so much but clandestinely found comfort in leaning our heavy heads on still
in the crook of its homely, familiar shoulder
thinking that we were Shakespeare's apprentices
through fluttering eyelids
creating clusters of words that had to have been New York Times worthy—we were sure
although we knew the furthest we could really go is the furthest your laugh could carry across a room
and that's still pretty far—we could all spit shake and swear—
because I can still hear it sometimes all the way down here
where each tendon in my body is capable of feeling solidity
where I am haunted by uhtceare, wondering if you're too cold
where halos don't exist outside of dreams
not even when the sun is a cracked egg and dripping onto tables, the roofs of cars
not even then is anything brighter than the whites of your lively eyes
and I think you'd like to know that we're still thinking about you
that I can't think about white anymore without thinking about the vulgarity of bathtubs
and your hate for poems that include contractions—I'm sorry I've let you down
but I think you'd like to know that I've finally stopped having nightmares
and even the thinnest-skinned of us all, you know which one,
has been able to convince himself that the embrace of the Earth
just isn't the place for you anymore
that you've already outgrown all of us at fifteen-years-old
and we're sorry for not believing sooner that poetry can save the world.