Had this come at a better time I would have placed my hands into your hands and we would have forgotten who was holding on to who. Instead I lower my eyes as your eyes close and bow to the end of whatever we had between us constructed. Little melting paper tissue promises, we traded words wrist over wrist, your mouth warm upon my alabaster skin.

I am the draining of the cup, I am the small child who writes only of leaving, only of the lightning in dark clouds. How even the slenderest tears streak the breast with fire before running aground.

I am picking at my fingernails and you are staring out the window of a neon train as my legs begin to burn. I used to dream I was covered in red ink and the more closely I inspected the skin the higher the vines of crimson would curl up and up across my stomach, my chest, my neck, and then I would awaken, awash in thrumming laps of sweat.

And here we are together parting ways, two hearts divided in ten thousand ways.

I watch as the gray buildings of the city sink slowly into the raging sun. I think of all the people reaching for something they do not understand and missing it like hell anyway.
Why do they think everything destructive is so pretty
and that everything pretty
is not them.

.

And what will you do to dig up these bones when I’m still here, how will you feed me to the wolves who need my throat, teach me, grow me with their yellow marks and claws. Suddenly it is all black water in this garden, the water rises and churns, setting the tides on fire and I am swimming deeper and deeper still until I find those things I lost so long ago, milkteeth, crickets, the shadows I crawled into behind my childhood eyes, before the waste of the world became so tired and over grown, before it was the cold which stung like bees, before it was the heart I bled underneath my sleeves.

The people don’t come back, they walk onward, they walk past, I weep for I would do the same, and have. The spaces in between my lungs (naked lungs severed and hanging from trees) there are wings fluttering there, little bodyless commotions, threadbare ivory wings who meant to reach for the burned out sun but fell blind, and I swallowed them whole.

No one to tell in hushed dry tones, no one to tease open my waterfall lips, no one to paint their ears on again, only doors into an ancient unhinged soul who is always leaving and does not bother to lock up anything.

Unchained, unrattled, untethered, untouched. This flesh was made for letting
go
of.

There is a dark moon which rises alone in every heart, it cannot move, only reflect, it cannot breathe. And as these nights cave the days in upon me, I do not reach, I do not reach. Bury me, all these beautiful little moth wing lights sifting down as I do not speak. All of these gentle lights burying me.

.

An excerpt from my book Luminae, coming this winter.

What are the skies like where you are, has the new air been good for you. Blue as the veins of the ocean tide, sweet as the almond sun. The way you look through the way I looked away. Do you bathe yourself with the salt of the tears in my hands, drink your tea warm with honey and is it sunset by the window, or everywhere. I hold your motion in the poetry, feel blindly the depths of the things I cannot touch. You enter me and leave your heart behind. Do you taste my hair against your strawberry mouth and draw the purple shades of night down with your low dark eyes.

I miss the lifetimes I spent alone,
someone’s always calling
but no one ever calls me home.

Could it be that we all reach for something like wind to keep us alive when the rest of the world smells only of rot, remains, annihilation. No two souls have ever touched each other inside such gentle bruising. How your teeth never quite leave my flesh days after, the way my voice fills your mind, dampens your tongue, breaks wild against your muscle. How I pray for your healing as I do for you to ache until it bleeds. Nobody says what they really mean.

When you move your body it speaks of the secrets you keep from everyone but me. Lights coming up all over the jagged bones of darkness. The drench of this heady stolen quiet smothering the bedtime trees. Desire presses in my skin. Beating hot, beating slow.

.

Maybe they will wait for a little while longer to see if the birds return. Mouthing their warm bodies against the hood of the cold. The turning of a doorknob in a crystal champagne room, fall your face into my hands, fall down the rabbit hole, fall up inside the stars. These words you take are the breath of me, my breath a mere illusion.

Please do not. my fragile blood cannot bear the chime of your laughter, that smile of yours will surely peel my skin from the silk of her cloth. It is dark inside the nest I built of shadows, the light and the darkness always forbidden and undressing themselves here, always one without the other, always both speaking at once.

The ticking of a clock: footsteps.
Time is running out
and in
on us.

When it all slows down we are made to face ourselves. It hurts like hellfire behind the eyes when the sun swells so. I used to write like morning dew and now I write like the gray grass beneath the dying, always trembling, always on the heels of the ashes of leaving. Drinking the hips of melancholy static, this is the way I was sewn into a body which never quite fits.

It will be love, I know, I know, it will be love which tears me away from you.
Love laid bare on the wings of a soul adrift, love the rain in the iron garden,
love the silent water bathing night among the reeds.

.

My poet is a wounded heart, beaten and bruised, she is still flowering.

In the hands of the darkness we fall upon our knees, turn our bodies into fantasy.

There is a body living in my mind.

She weeps, she feeds upon the thoughts I am watering like vines. A rose to my lips and your face at every window, you shadow of my shadow, you the haunt I breathe as I sleep. It was quiet, the violence, when my veins began to rush with blood, ache for the pierce of your teeth.

The pitiful grace of you, smoke gray the empty eyes, the brutality of the things you do to me in the name of a love you have never known. I break as you force my petal mouth slow.

How insistent my desire opening the moon, how mad the redness of this fire.

.