I promised myself that was the last poem about you.
But,
I've always been one of those people who
plays the same song on repeat
until it syncs with my heartbeat
and rattles my bones to dust.
or who
re-reads the same books until
the lines become my holy scripture,
the plot become my genesis and
my body becomes a canvas for a script I know by heart.
My head is filled with drafts for poems I've never written,
and hands I've never held.
I should blame it on courage but I blame it on you instead.
Maybe I'm just one of those people who
gives everything to one boy, forever.
Maybe he's just my routine,
like in the military.
Bright and early awake then straight to the battle field.
My body is adorned with marbled bruises
and crimson gunshot wounds
and when I rest for the night,
I'm shackled to a mattress of stone,
stained in the thick wine that pulses through my veins,
until the next morning,
when I must do it again.
The sunrise is my enemy.
She tugs at my eyelids
with raw fingernails each new day,
and I still fall asleep with
you as the only thing on my mind.

They say that you can't quit the army.
The cowards way out of a few wounds.
"Stay and it'll be a lifetime of glory".
And that's what he promises me.

fate...
an invisible power
meant to intertwine our strings
but soon disappear
so everyone else may watch us
begin to fray
where we've tied our knots.

every mistake i make
opens yet another canyon in the ground,
and just as i begin to hesitate,
you tighten your grip.

every mistake i make
ends up with you disappointed
and me with
double-sided thoughts so sharp
they could ****.

and yet every time
i come to the same concluding solution of-sorts-
does it hurt me more to stay
or hurt you more if i left?

maybe
one day
whether it’s tomorrow
or five years from now
we will find
the person
and it will work
in ways we didn’t think were possible
but all i know
is for now
in this moment
i wish it were you

s.s

and he said "can we be friends"
                                                i didn't really know. "i have enough friends"

"well what are we then?"      
                                                the silence was deafening. then i wrote my last
                                                poem in the space standing between us
                                                "we are a bundle of photographs in an old shoe
                                                box we put at the tippy top of our closest next
                                                to our old dreams and constellations and
                                                watch it slowly gather dust. and when our
                                                children ask who our first loves were we think
                                                back quietly to the faded memories we shared
                                                and try to push each other from the brain even
                                                after all the years. and perhaps a little bit of
                                                dust gets caught in one of our eyes and we are
                                                asked "mommy are you crying" and "of course
                                                not honey" follows soon after but we both
                                                know somewhere there was an entirely
                                               different universe out there for us to share but
                                               it's okay because we will smile at our respective
                                               children and homes and spouses and you will
                                               say "of course not, it was always your mom";