Loving her was like chasing a sunset,
Each day, a new opportunity
To despair

Imagine loving someone with the diligence and care of a blind person reading Braille, fingers scanning bumps, tactile derivation of understanding

All that's left of you and I,
Is the past tense.
You and I are
A handful of photographs,
Old emails,
A single boarding pass to Toronto and
Hazy memories,
Fraying at the edges
More and more every day.
I miss you.
I wish you and I could be any other tense.
I wish the thought of you and I mattered.

I am thankful for:
Every beautiful woman I've ever met,
Every one who laid in my bed,
Every woman who let me care,
Every burden they let me bear,
I'm thankful for every lesson learned
Thankful for every scar earned
I'm thankful for my only love,
A divine happenstance from above,
Who helped realize a burgeoning poet,
Who, criminally, didn't even know it

There is a lifetime to hold this woe,
To process and reframe,
But never let go

And I'll visit whatever vestiges I've left,
Because you still hold my heart,
An inconceivable theft

Do you know about the silence?
The silence that becomes deafening at night,
When you're trying to cling to the warm embrace of sleep?

Listen!

You can hear it from over 3,000 miles away,
It's the mutual silence perpetuated by two parties,
Wracked with guilt and pride.

It's the silence of damaged egos,
The silence of perceived slights,
And all despite burning thoughts of each other,

It creeps up in your ear,
When you're cradling your lover,
It hisses like a snake and breeds doubt

It's the silence that screams,
And leaves your ears ringing for ages,
Leaving you begging, "PLEASE STOP!"

It subsides,
You fill the absence with white noise,
Relationships, infatuations

But it can always find you,
Slithering into the crevices of your thoughts,
When you take a moment to breathe

I can't stand ticking clocks;
They remind me of every second that
*you're not here

I want your poison so badly,
Every inch of me aches for you to infiltrate my bloodstream
And spread your disease,
Corrupt me on a cellular level
Until my veins collapse and
I bleed your toxic spirit from every pore

Pull the trigger,
Do it,
Set in motion this cascade of events

Lock and load,
**** the hammer,
This firing pin demands action

BOOM!

Muzzle flash,
Smoke,
A bullet case innocently falls

Tear through bone and flesh,
A maelstrom of destruction,
Who will be your next target?

I'll never see you,
And I think I know how the sun must feel about the moon

You live on in my head,
Like a tumor I cannot excise.
Or refuse to.
I can't tell anymore.

Funny how nobody ever truly leaves,
They become ghosts,
Animated by regret, goodwill, love, jealousy, pettiness
Muffled by distractions, dates, girlfriends, ***.

Please, just let me be.

A curious reflex, a little twitch,
As her smile gently curved up
Every time he tasted her memory

Where was I two years ago?
Nuzzling your hair?
Kissing your cheek?
Or was I numb with pain by now?
Every word choked out like pulling teeth.

Did we take a shower together that day?
Where I swore your body
Begged me to stay?
Did I ask you yet your reasons why?
Did you tell me nothing in reply?
Did I ask you yet if this was just a break?
Did I go to bed, praying I’d never wake?

Lips the taste of disastrous perfection
A kiss that could only portend my undoing

I stared at the sunset, fading, shedding its radiant tears smeared across the sky, purple, blue pastels
And counted the seconds I had left to hold your hand
I see you in everyone else's grief
And I never really stopped to think what "You're dead to me" really feels like
Not malicious, no, just an unmarked tombstone in my head I visit on occasion to pay respects and remember a beautiful mistake

it's the car crash that nobody was around to see, nobody to call for help
it's the drop from the precipice that never ended
that sensation in your gut of sickening weightlessness
forever in perpetuity
it's this daily unanswered call
an echo unreturned
it's this constant hesitation
this wavering sensation of incompletion
a melody with no conclusion, unresolv-

I was always starved for your kiss,

Once you playfully held back,
A harmless betrayal

I remember doing the same thing to a girl after you,
The balance of power obvious

Woe betide whoever craves their lover's kiss more

I don't want to fix you,
Don't want to change you,
Control you,
I want you as broken as I am,
I want you *just the way you are

You let me hold you one last night,
One last night to sleep away this misery

You softly asked,
"Mike? Do you think I'm pretty?"

I gently kissed your back,
"I think you're gorgeous"

In my head,
Your grave plot is beautiful,
And I visit it every. single. day.

You are a delicate car crash,
A gentle forest fire,
An elegant apocalypse.

Reckless
Impulsive
Awful
Irresponsible
Frantic
Love

A kiss so potent,
To speak of it is verboten

No matter what happens,
*******,
be kind to each other

Bury me,
Strike my name from the records,
Pretend this never happened

We never ******, or kissed,
Held hands or met

In this new world,
You are untouched, unharmed,
I was never there to hurt you,
I was never there to love you

Blacklist me from this life,
And cast me into oblivion,
Where I was never even born

Hatred, agony in your wake
You'll repent upon the stake
Flames licking clean your crime
Your memory forevermore in grime

Bite your tongue
Your song is sung
******* villain
Your guts are spilling

You're the virus
that will live dormant in me
forever

Vital signs inviting death
Take my last breath
I want to be free
Take this life from me
Thoughts of you in my head
Just leave me for dead
Watching this time accrue
I'm sorry, I love you

I can still remember your voice,
Fragmented as though refracted through a prism
I remember pressing delete on the last voicemail you ever sent me,
You called to thank me for the flowers,
You called me thoughtful, sweet,
You were tripping over your words with joy,
And I couldn't handle it after you left,
Because your voice reminds me of symphonies and plane crashes
And oh God, how it still echoes sometimes,
Like the sound of a child's laughter ringing across an abandoned playground,
Your voice resonated with the frequencies of my heart strings,
And now I fear it would only cause earthquakes

warm blonde hair brushed my cheek as I stroked your arched back,
silken skin like porcelain and cream,
I inhaled your perfume down to my toes,
before realizing it was all a dream

I poured a double
Try to forget you a while
I'll be back again

Red wine courses through my veins
Another glass poured as the bottle drains
And my lips in time have ruby stains
I think of you and my heart, it pains

I shovel my feelings into the furnace,
To keep warm,
In the winter of your absence

Whisper me sweet lullabies
Hold me tight and promise me
That I'll never have to live without you

"It's going to get worse," you wrote,
Your disappointment drenched me like a cold rain

And all I could do was apologize,
Insist I didn't mean it,
Beg you for another chance

But saving this was like trying to resuscitate a man shot 56 times

We all lie in the beds we make,
But the worst part is wondering,
*"What if?"

She prefers silence to words
Redundant noises vibrating emptily like the buzzing wings of a gnat
Her quiet will shatter you like a bullet through a windowpane

But look at old photographs, see her beam
Look closely and you can see the sadness seeping through her smile
She's seen enough to know what's worth suffering for
And she knew you weren't worth the fight

You came along to kiss away the boy in me,
To show me what happens when you love with no compromise,
You were the most painful and beautiful thing I've ever met

I tried fixing you instead of kissing every beautiful scar
Instead of caressing every jagged edge, on which I gladly would have sliced my hands if you'd let me

Had I realized what heartache does to people, I wouldn't have been so callous,
I wouldn't have lashed out, I would have thought twice
I'm sorry it cost two broken hearts for me to learn
I'm sorry I'm blind in everything but hindsight

I wish you could have met the man you made me,
And maybe we both could reflect on years gone by