quiver

tear it up and spit it out,
all these things I worry about.
kiss me once more like you mean it,
I want more than anything for you to be my knife, and
tell me how to stop making these long drives home.
tell me how to keep you
tell me I mean as much to you
as everything else does.

x

loving you is like pulling my own teeth,
I'm just getting what I deserve.
keep on telling me that this will never end my blue eyed dove
"this is what we get for looking down,
it's all just your happiness turned into sound"

this green ghost

seven years,
and you finally understand the way your parents used to fight.
life tarnishes your heart until you can't bring yourself to use it.
every night it breaks into your home,
climbs in bed,
wraps it's long fingers around your head.
we thought you could make it on your own,
but all you could do is head back home.
she said this is what comes of wanting to be dead
you'll never get it right until you do.
in the end this ghost is mine and mine alone.

you can only take what you can carry

you are the decay inside my cells.

you are the things that belong to no one else.
and it's been a long time since I made my peace with misery,
but I still end the nights,
dripping
after an hour of scalding my own skin,
trying to shower away this horrible taste in my mouth.

I am waiting to stop waiting

we spend years filling up who we are when we are alone.
carefully choosing paint to match the couch cushions.
carpet that affirms the reasons we got a dog.
but today the paint is peeling off the wall.
the dust is thick on the floor
(and I promise you I'll keep a cleaner house,
if only I know you will be coming home.)
we sleep in separate rooms.
every night you pick up the pieces of plate in the dining room,
and I doze, more alone with myself than ever before.
but I cannot blame us for anything any more,
not even for the oil spill spreading
in the sea of this relationship.

wisteria in the water

it is becoming too much, my darling,

spending all our days softly shut in a still cocoon.

if we don't block it out the world will eat all our air. 

so instead out of this quiet porch

we conceive ourselves a room to burn in.

the ash gets in our lungs and eyes

and invents for us another blanket.

gallant

sitting in the room
drinking up our wounds
your words are too thin and sharp
they fill your mouth like another row of teeth.
the light it swings
my eyes are shut
it catches us in corners
"Nothing is ever good enough."
you leave home and it is the most terrifying thing you've ever done.
take me with you,
just let yourself slosh around in my insides
test out the limbs, press against the back of the skin
you wanted a camera for christmas,
and the secret to never being alone.
Welcome Home.

limbo

we live in the spaces between dead leaves on the front lawn

limbs askew 

twisting among the dew

we live in the lines of my palm, 
we decay this way.

tenderly severing our last latent chords
from weary limbs.

"Can you just tell me why ?"

--


"and I am not a saint
just a sinner who sometimes makes mistakes."

quick

the scratches appear gradually.
thin and secretive in the folds of the limbs.
no one notices one more
and another,
growing quietly like so many little lies.
eventually,
the tears at the corners of the mouth will widen.
accommodating a new voice
as sweet as--(and this is a lie)

spending hours in my closet,

drowning everything in a white linen sea.
there is no escaping it.

some where down here between my knees

and the taste of every single one of my regrets,
you will forget how to be human.