Hey, you say,

I just called to tell you that I love you.

Or do I? Do you? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.

So I laugh, and hang up, and leave you hanging,

Like you always do to me.

This power dynamic,

It’s sick and it’s twisted and deliciously unbelievable

Like the kind of chemistry that they try to show in those old shitty movies

That you love so much,

You know, the ones that you always go on about

with all of your obscure references

that we all roll our Young and Fresh and Free eyes at

But your own freedom is something you crave

You’ve shown me how lost you’d be without it

Oh, but how you would find yourself if you gave it all away!

To someone you can trust,

To someone you could try to believe would never hurt you

But promises are dangerous things, I know.

Oh trust me, I know!

But I will never give up on showing you

What an amazing person I think you could be

If you would only let yourself become the guy you’ve always wanted

You were always too afraid to even try, you say,

Well, I’m here now.

So don’t you dare take my hand because that’s not the way we do romance.

What we have is dipped in arsenic, in benzene,

Like a shortbread cookie with the chocolate, oh,

The coating melts on my fingers, and my tongue melts in your mouth

It’s so damn easy to ignore the way anyone else has ever tasted inside of me

And I smile when I forget that you liked my friend

And you smile when I forget that I liked yours

And we come together, wrapped up in the salty smell of angst and adoration,

And we know that what we have is real, but that the movies tell us lies.

Hey, you say.

Hey.

His face is sandpaper, his hands a safe-house. he passes by and I fight the urge to put pen to paper then and there. Even if I did, his face shifts this way or the other, avoiding me, my gaze, unable to be captured by something so worldly as a ballpoint. He is a poem, his hands the second stanza- not the kind you’d hold so much as the kind you want on your shoulder, holding you back from harm and pushing you toward opportunity. He is a poem.

Another day passes outside the window of a plane
I cross dusk with 170 strangers who hold each other’s hands or thighs when the clouds quiver.

And I can’t stop thinking about your fingers running through my hair

or the way your eyes knocked into me that July.

You made me feel like feeling itself was cracking from my chest

and hurtling across the universe,

becoming every iron, nitrogen, oxygen, n’ sulfur soul that lost the sunset to the sunrise

in thoughts of “I want you”

Because your lips burn cosmic explosions into my skin:

a creation story.

Now, heads drape over the mountains

like the twinkle lights you hung out on the patio for Christmas–

You tried to play Claire de Lune on your harmonica

and remember that you loved me.

But you left 8 months later

on a Tuesday.

7:53 p.m.

The pool lights stained your words teal

and smeared my eyeliner into a glimmering sort of heavy.

You said “late summer’s nostalgic,”

noticed the fireflies had all gone,

and I could hear crickets whimper to the sun,

“don’t go.”

And I never wanted another falling moon or set of sandpaper hands to hang onto.

You said I felt frail

like a dandelion you were keeping

from the wind.

And then you just let go.

That night, I woke up laughing,

as 1,000 tiny suns sprouted from my lips,

already dreaming of drifting.

Crossing through purple skies

like telephone wires

rushing to the seaside.

Paris stole my lipstick.

smeared it across cheeks

and hostel sheets and wine glasses, Merlot,

turned my teeth violet and my heart

a violent sort

of love you,

maddened by the beauty of it all.

Like I could chase train tracks

into the self I wanted

into Budapest, or Berlin.

A decrepit sort of art,

like you could tear

my heart into dusty fallen parts

and I’d just become more,

and faces and feet would flood through me, paint

bucket lists on my thighs and think of freedom.
I was never meant to be kept from the wind.