The Anatomy of Being

I look at you and see all the ways a soul can bruise, and I wish I could sink my hands into your flesh and light lanterns along your spine so you know that there's nothing but light when I see you.

I hate seeing poetry in everything I touch. I hate that I can no longer love you without turning you into a metaphor - that it can never be simple as looking at you and saying yes, yes, yes.

You will lie to everyone you love. They will love you anyways.

Once, I believed in you like a poem, turned your heart into a metaphor for my heart, turned our mouths into honey and caramel lozenges. But metaphors come and metaphors go, and not even seasons have the courtesy to stay till dawn.

All you need is a twenty in your pocket and a bus ticket. All you need is someone on the other end of the map, thinking about the supple curves of your body, to guide you to a home that stretches out for miles and miles on end.

I am a forest fire and an ocean, and I will burn you just as much as I will drown everything you have inside.

Let the word in and sooner or later people will see the oceans pouring out of you. You'll walk down the street and someone will mistake you for the sky. You are beautiful because you let yourself feel, and that is a brave thing indeed.

I should've told you that you could rearrange continents with that smile of yours.

I am not as strong as my words pretend to be. Not as quiet as these caesuras promise. This heart is a patchwork quilt of people that leave different shades of blue inside of me.

And still, Your mouth on my mouth Is a thought as fresh as Melting icicles away With my breath

I think we all speak a different sort of language than one another, but boy you sound a whole lot like coffee on a Sunday morning.

You, with your hands full of Earth and your head full of rainfall. How many hearts do you hold in your own?

Hope? I don't need your strength anymore. Because this morning, I stood on my roof as the sun chiseled its way into every single pore of my body, and I realized that I am made of flames, that if you touch me, you will burn—that I am the only match I need to burn.

Tectonic plates are shifting beneath my skin and there's a new continent in my chest that I want to call by your name

I will never fail to inflate my lungs for you when you're a hundred miles deep, heading headfirst towards a telephone pole - screaming - because you have pulled out all your own brakes.

I want for my words to be touched gently, as if you had never seen my sort of dialect before, as if you never wanted to read anyone else again.

I love like a leaky faucet or I love like a dam breaking. There is nothing in between.

When you want to fall—fall, Evaporate and condensate, but when you rain, come down as a hurricane.

I touch the knots beneath the skin of your back, trace the tree lines around your wrist, and you smile at me and I love you for how human you are.

Listen. When the wind blows all your candles out, when the stars turn to plumes of smoke, when your mother makes you watch as the matches burn out in her eyes, Let me hold your hand, your skin, the stones you've swallowed in your sleep. Let me slip your soul out of your skin so you can sleep in my palms for tonight.

English language, my ass. When you kiss me, my syntax hits the wall across the room and shatters in shards of words that scatter across the floor.

Underneath the moonlight, we laid and laughed like run-on sentences, kissed like ellipses, and you held me so close that I wear my bones down smooth against the grain of your skin.

We walk around carrying Closed signs around our necks while we press Open to our chests and wonder why the doorbell never rings.

I love you for how human you are.

I wonder how it is that you, you are just a handful of billion of cells.

O, how the body knows all that language cannot say.

I want to take long romantic walks up your arm with my lips. I wanna picnic on the arc of your neck and sneak a bottle of wine in a thermos with you and get stoned somewhere on the mossy side of your ribs.

People change and people keep change and we keep paying ticket fines and hoping that that means something close to love, and I'm bankrupt from missing you.

I'm running out of things to say. I've stopped stealing pages out of poetry books, but last week I pocketed a thesaurus and looked for synonyms for you and could only find rain and more rain and a thunderstorm that sounded like glass, like crystal, an orchestra.

We make believe that even our tongues are bulletproof, as if we are stronger than what these fragile bones can take.