I've been choking from the moment
I was forced to let you go
I should have spoke it out of poems
so that you would ever know
that I am bowing out & broken
want to unlearn every bone
until my heart re-bleeds the reasons
I keep sleeping here alone

so won't you
untie all my finger-tips
& hand me back my lungs
I was the fool that glued my heart to you
please can't you see what you have done ?

exhausted by the nights & dawn
that break me over you

I've tried a thousand times and still
there's nothing I can do

I've skipped the songs
& cursed your arms
I burn inside my sleep;
to wake now wearing scars
from break-neck-love
made urgently

the truth in me
I'll never speak
of love that wouldn't keep;
my bones they lay
upon the stage
get played with bows of grief

the cellist stripped my ribs
a trick to twist in perfect fifths
& I admit, a love like this
a pain I cannot quit

on quieter occasions
& they were all just moments
I'd close to meet your truth
different coasts, different rooms
that, I'd noticed in you
cause I'd kissed like this too;
like the kiss itself had a mind
it wanted to mean what it was doing;

I generously swallowed my pride

that there is never a right time
never a right place
for anything

it always just comes down to honesty
and reason

and I can't reason with my truth anymore
I don't know how to stop
how to end this, *being in love with you

it's always the same
you everywhere
& me
finding the poetry in shaking
finally finding it silent
then realizing
this
this missing you
this loving you in volumes

it's the noisiest thing

I saw something
I found romance in reflection
before & after coffee
I compared the breeze to you
I felt humiliated
I've been all but
kept up
I've been all but kept by you

What have you seen in it ?

I'll swallow it after it cools down
&
small parts of me will never give up on you

I admit to this
incompetence
existing where you hover

when skin insists
the silent fits
truth is, I fit
the incidental other

my lip or bones
shake to remind
these never-ending hours

from black to fooled
I saw in you
the grab of drowning flowers

what love is well
can never tell
the right in what I do

the finding in
this woman’s hand
what won't belong to you