[x]

preemptive breakup poemif anyone ever tells you your sadness isn't physical,
show them the ache in your bones,
the raw skin on your arms or wrists or hips or thighs,
the imprint of your foetal body on your mattress from the days you couldn't bear to leave.

and you see this?
this is what hurt looks like.
i want you to look closer, lean in a little until you can feel the sadness on my breath
and i want you to watch my eyes. count how often they blink and count how many of them are forcing back words i still can never say.
i don't want you to miss a second of how you make me feel.

i want to be what keeps you up at night
i want to be the reason you can't eat

cumbersomei cannot say what i need to say,

there are many, many things we cannot talk about:

the military, its ploys,

its gunmetal toys;

the way a gap in the teeth

draws a crinkle like cellophane

to a face once filled

with green eyes and irish love;

the r's thrown deep into

the charles,

the dirty water in which

boys with lesser sense

might find themselves;

the greenery and celtic landscape;

and you,

entirely you,

you in full-

i cannot talk about you

because i miss you so much my heartache has a heartache

like acid reflux burning my body

and it is just so unbearably sad

to know

that none of this can be fixed

because in less than a

things i don't know about you that bother me thati wonder what it's like
to fall asleep beside you
in a post coital haze,
and to wake in the morning
to run to class.
do you wake me,
do you kiss my forehead,
do we make love again-
i don't know,
not yet.

and do you wet your toothbrush
before applying toothpaste,
oh,
tell me you don't leave the sink running,
it must get awfully tired.

and what do you dream of
when i lie next to you,
blissfully more than just a body;
what will you dream of
a year from now?
please tell me i can fit into
your big picture
as easily as i can fit into
your arms,
eternally.

you arei want a city ruined
every time you love me.
i want to show how loudly i shake,
enough to break
faults and how it will never be yours,
and bring down skylines
when you aren't here.

there are seven weeks until my blood runs blank,
but it is so full tonight
it could drown a man.
i hope it drowns you,
the way it carries the only beautiful thing about me
to you;
my heart, my love.

it's time you pull together
your telephone wires and breathe stars
back into my body-
it was so dark without you.
there was no moon,
just the kind of black
you know could be no emptier.

i am effulgent again
with the ways i've needed to feel,
i am

the first poem i wrote since i told you i love youthe star-soaked stains
that covered our nudity
gives way at last
to a tequila sunrise,
so low in the sky;

it's still bright enough
to sting my eyes,
and yet i can't bring myself
to hate it.

your body next to mine,
every effort is made
to move a heavy limb
closer
because any space
we have
is space i don't want.

i am sometimes humbled
by my feelings,
the way they swell
in my throat
just how the ocean
tastes the shore.

there is always something new
to find hidden in my heart,
summoned by my words,
or the salt of your skin
wearing like wind on shale
against mine.

i don't think i can ever tell you
i love you enough.

i

100 sunday crosswordsthis is a story of broken pieces
letting go feature by feature;
shattered pieces, ice rain,
and something blacker than sadness
turning from snowfall to knives
and the scarlet ground that follows.

this is about knowing when to stop
but never knowing the time.

because fingers snap louder in the cold,
they shiver and shake, shiver and shake
until the tremours turn to bone
and you feel it when they break.
a century's warning isn't enough to prepare for an earthquake;
a thousand years is still a blink when the last sinews
split.

there is nothing welcome about the open air
and how it bites your exposed skin,
its teeth sharpen and g

a thorough submissioni have found my heart-
it has put itself into this.
my hesitations are little more
than bad habits,
filed somewhere between
biting my nails and always saying i'm sorry.

the expectation of the winds
blowing softer til they ceased
ended with your mouth on mine;
the nerves fraying from fear
have been tended to with needle and thread;
and the water i so wiklfully wouldn't touch
feels warmer as it inches
like your hands
up my ankles to my bare knees.

i have found my heart-
it has put itself into this.
my stomach turns the ocean calm
when i think of the messes i'll make,
and the sewing you will stitch.
and i'm terrified
like ni

write what hurtsi'm here to tell you
about fire and living
& how both burn even if you ignore them

it's not about what feels good
it's about what doesn't
cornering what hurts
and exposing it
really displaying it
pedestal on high
for what it is
and not what it pretends to be

you are not living
until you hurt
you can't be alive
if all you know is comfort

comfort is only a sign
that you are doing what you know
it is admittance of limitation
because you are human
and only know so much
and it's agonising to think
that you can be comfortable with that
and not want to reach out
and touch every thing you find
and read every book you see
an

the commutei keep your kiss
under my bed:
i won't lose it
just because you aren't here.

instead,
i will hesitate in the spaces
between the weeks
we are together,
and we are
apart.

i will write you letters
and gaps and commas
when my head stops spinning
and my pride takes a bow
to the lion of my heart,
and feel the stinging air
of imagination
seep out of its balloon.

put your (love) affairs in order, dear
and find me under your blankets;

i want the places i know best
to be the ones made of skin,
secretly tucked away
in the crook of your elbow
where my body rests, or
behind your ear,
like a pencil-

i want you to write me words

leonardwoodi had missed you before i'd met you;
i am missing you before you've left
&today you are gone.

there is nothing,
no drink nor organic acid nor chemical high
to dim the lights on the epilleptic flashes
of love i can't let go,

the panic i blindly follow
as your airplanes leave from boston
&chicago and turn from wings to wheels
as a bus takes you three hours further
to a war zone in missouri.

you told me you loved me
as you vanish for nine months
of the next year.
you promise letters to make up
for the fear you impressed upon us,
love i never let leave,
an empty room i could never stay;
you promised me words
&a heart a thousand miles west
&hop

sandstormthere is sand in my teeth
from days i don't remember;
hot-sun deserts singeing
the hairs on the back of my neck,
feet back from burns:

i know what it's like
playing with fire.
i know how to perch
like birds on my thin toes
along a wire,
i know the electricity
coursing through the rubber,
a centimetre from death:
i have yet to fall.

precarious placements
on precarious precipices,
i am wondering if my wings still work,
or if i've purged them out;
if they've atrophied from my back,
or filled with bile.

the sand shifts
and i am looking at bone.
a skeleton, full and articulate.
the desert has charred him black;
his skin has

the mat that clung to my backmy story was that
love knew me,
& i knew love;
that we embraced,
our limbs interwoven
like the fabric
of the universe.

it has been two weeks,
& i have two freckles
like tooth marks
right where you left
a bruise,
that last time
i saw you,
the last time
i thought maybe
you could love me
as i am.

the sadness of how
mistaken i was
fills me up now
& blossoms like a flower,
hot tea like twigs & branches
within my bones.

my story has changed thus:
i loved
i lost
i fell
apart.

i hope,
more than the number of wishes
made on the stars tonight,
that one day,
you can be in a relationship
with me
instead of my sickness;

a lack of language, in coloursyou tell me you miss me
and that i am more beautiful
than any girl in georgia
or even barcelona.

everything is fitting like magic
between fingers when they
finally, finally
touch,

and i swear for the past three nights,
that's all i've dreamt.

give me acrylics
and i still can't make you see
the exact shade of warm
you are to me.

give me the ocean
and there are not enough waves
in its body
to show just the way i feel
when our own vessels move together.

seven months since we last said goodbye,
since we last said hello-
i could fill libraries
with reasons
to love you.

what i really want to ask
is if you think you can

between two months is two shorti like to think of you.
sometimes you are a butterfly,
wings stretched back
in long arcs,
bones breaking into flight
behind your protruding chest-
you are beautiful.

i find myself sinking
into the irish kills in your eyes,
the gaps in your smile.
i touch the cauterised cuts
sealed by metal and fire
on the backs of your swollen knuckles
and kiss your crooked lips.

in two months you will leave.
in the wake of st. valentine's sacrifice,
i will send my heart to war with you.
look beneath your pillow
and find it there;
look in the space between your walls
and there it will be;
look within your chest, beside your own heart
and

before georgia takes you again

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More from *ohsostarryeyed

mouse in my wallsthe scratching in my walls is more furious
as the winter weather comes.

it is blackbird and grey cloud,
swarms of honeybees fallen asunder.
the rhythm of wanton waves
ebbs and flows with the
ribbon in my heart.

this is where the road peels back
into thunderous layers of cold,
bobbing skins of ice floes.
this is where you and i
fall in love and entwine our
stiff limbs into patterns of warmth.

i like the sounds the creaking branches
make in the wallowing wind.
it's like the magic made by the
static of the sky,
the milky way's bitter feet
prancing with lily-footed hooves
across the black heavens above our
naked heads. you m

Oi'm feeling really sad.
it's starting in my toes and
burning up my shins,
ashen sins seeping into the
cold bones of my hips
and filtering into every stream
of blood in my body.

i want a distraction -
from this sadness,
from the heavy feeling
in my stomach,
from the twitches in my
fingers as they grasp empty air
in hopes of a silver cut.

i think i will ask her to lend me a shirt
for saturday night,
something pretty and daring
and unlike me in every way.
i don't want to be myself anymore
and i don't want to be myself
when i reflect on the number of hands
clutching at esoteric bodies.
i am a secret
that is not worth hiding

but when is enough enough?can i tell you now how i've dissipated,
dissolved into the fabric's interstices
swallowed like living pride
i weigh less than i ever have,
i am less than i've ever been,

let's watch as i count every single
calorie in every single
morsel to touch my tongue,
let's see how far i've fallen,
beautiful boy,
let's see how much i hurt.

how hollow i'm painted these days,
dark shadows gracing the lines
of every feeling i beat,

can you see the way i breathe
conflict with every gasp,
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for in hopes of bowing to my breast,
the abandoned fears burning under
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the

sanguinethe hay is sticking to my fingers.

"oh god, what have i done?"

i am greeted with silence, a river of red dancing at my boots.  i see the pitchfork, stained crimson at its tines, and my stomach convulses.

her dress is torn, animalistic claws shredding the length of its blue skirt, and her legs scraped raw.  i see her face, see what i have done to its beauty, and sink to the floor of the barn until the scent of moist earth fills my nose.

"i'm sorry, i'm so, so sorry."  my voice sounds strangled and far away.  "elisabeth, forgive me.  i'm so, so sorry.  i will be a better man, i swe

man at the cafehe's sitting there at the cafe
sandwich on thick white bread
and straggling beansprouts

and i hate the look in his eye.

he is by himself
so he's thinking
and his hat is tilted over his face
so he's in shadow
and he won't look up
from his sandwich
so i am actively watching him.

i know he is sad.

i know he is waiting for a girl
to show up,
or maybe he's just thinking of one,
maybe he's just wishing
she were here
because when she's not,
he's alone.

maybe he's never seen her,
but his heart knows she's out there
and his soul can't sleep
until he's found her.

maybe he thinks he knows her,
and maybe she's an ocean away.
mayb

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you call me an angel

by *ohsostarryeyed, Jan 28, 2013, 9:37:29 PM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

you call me an angel
in spite of the bruises left on the fronts of my knees
stains of sin left on my skin;

the knots in my back,
you liken to the wings soon to burst from my shoulders
&tell me you can feel no sadness
when looking at my face-

eyes you analyse
into paints of the colour wheel,
several shades i have yet to see;
my smile,
despite its crooked nature
&peeling lips,
thinning enamel from my sickness-
you still find me amongst the heavens.

&sometimes,
as this once,
i kissed you to shut you up.

my skin is removing itself after my clothes
in the winter,
cold &dark,
too unlike the white night of russian summers.

i kissed you &it was wet because i was crying
&every time our lips parted
another sob stuttered its way through the gap.
you heard what words i couldn't swallow,
the ones straining to pass over my tongue
yet drowned upon existence.

you listen to me until i lose my headstrong aim
to starve back to bones,
to see the angel wings i've lost in my skin
you touch &feel are there;

you leave me warm
&wet in a cool bed beneath your window
as no one had managed before;

you lull me to sleep
with lips on my
forehead
cheek
nose
chin
&hold me lightly enough
that i can move
unrestrained
but when i do,
i only curl closer
to you.