Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
I lay next to you
Rhythmic movements Between your chest and mine.
Hello perfect hair on your head
Sometimes I get jealous of the way it gets to follow you everywhere.
Attached yet tensionless.
I hope to be that for you someday.
Have you seen the perfectly circular mole on the back of your neck?
Do you think it feels as loved as the front of you?
I will be sure to kiss it more often,
Make it feel seen as you do for me every day.
Do you think the sunrise knows what love is?
Pink and orange hues lay a backdrop alongside your perfect face.
I think it knows when it glistens in a room full of fondness and devotion.
It feels intentional when it finds us, laying in bed, holding one another.
Sometimes I think about the way your head is shaped like a potato.
Or the way the valley between your nose and upper lip is soft underneath the burly-ness.
Just like both of us,
Rough on the surface but soft on the inside.
I hope you don’t hate the potato part.
There are leaves covering the ground.
Shades of sage green, cardinal red, and russet,
reminding me of the involuntary nature of transformation.
Mother Earth has created a perfume that sits densely in the air.
A  glorious aroma that is smelt solely through the soul.
Ferns and mosses are such underrated wildlife.
Surely the flowers are worth marveling over,
but it is the moss and ferns that lay the landscape of beauty.
They are the backdrop and very essence of this earth
Where is it written that you are not worthy?
That darkness makes you unloveable.
That loving you is a responsibility I cannot carry
Or should not carry.
Who taught you that you are a monster undeserving of compassion?
It was odd,
Watching you walk away from the self I knew you to be.
Maybe that was necessary.
To see you for you,
Not merely the man I crafted in my mind
While I was drunk on your potential.
It was always your potential.
In a state of blue,
You are indifferent to the notion of we.
Passionless embraces and deadpan expressions.
I do my best to fill the vacancy that so blatantly sits behind your smile.
You've become comfortable in your melancholy.
At home in your hollowness.
Every woman I know
Has been a rehabilitation center for men.
As if femininity seduces sickness.
It is not our duty
To mend the fragmented bits of you.
To mother your mental health.
We are not your restoration center.
I used to write about your resemblance to flowers.
Words like
blossoming,
beauty,
and growth
rolled so easily off my tongue.
My vantage point has changed,
and I now write of the ways you are much more like a ****.
Unpleasant,
incessant,
and maddening.
There is an elderly ladybug
that has taken up residence on my bathroom wall.
I don't know her well, but she appears wise.
Her coloring is dull,
likely weathered from her simple existence.
Aren't we all a bit dulled from living?
A bit more bland over time?
Her dense spots remind me that she is a veteran of this world.
She has seen the earth's soil in a way I will never have the good fortune of knowing.

I've found myself searching for her each morning,
wondering her whereabouts and what her evening has entailed.
Funny, how she is teaching me so much in so few words.
I asked the rose to look inward;
At its bramley thorns, weathered stem, and dirt-covered roots.
Change, I said.
Be velvety and new,
Free of filth,
Unblemished.
More of this, less of that.
The rose then asked, "And what will I be without those intricacies?"
"Vapid, yet mine", I replied.
It was warm there, burrowed in the nook of your neck
On that cold yet cozy autumn morning.
"дом", you said.
Home it was,
in every language.
I wonder if the tic tac knew its fate
When you oh-so-gently placed it on your tongue.
Did it know we'd be here?
A year later.
With no longer a need for aroma-altering substances.
I wonder what it would think
of our early morning kisses.
Full of sleep-filled smells.
Worshiping each-others undoneness.

— The End —