you
who are
beautiful
are
always thinking.
there is no image
like the image
of a man who thinks.
the inside of my right thigh will be where he writes
his autobiography.
he is obsessed with leaving
love notes on my skin
and I will wake up
some mornings i walk past
the bathroom mirror
finding things like “remember me” drawn backwards
across my collarbone.
this is to the man who throws a penny in the water fountain and it throws it back
the metaphor of your life.
it rained
the day before you came
the sky fell
knocked over
dripping red from God’s veins.
it smelled of all the wet things in New York City.
when i got home, soaking and heavy,
it was silent—the clock clapped
its hands. i was hoping you’d bring me flowers
from the last grave you buried your mind in.
i was hoping you’d at least remember to kiss me first.
you simply smiled and shook your head so that your hair,
silly and waving, rambled over your forehead
like surrendering flags.
you make my blood self-conscious.
i can’t look at you without a little girl drowning in me,
without a self-righteous woman running naked down my spine,
a dove flapping its wings
against the walls
of my stomach
i can’t look at you without tripping over my eyelids.
you hold a world in those eyes of yours.
when God made you,
he wrote his first suicide note,
folded it into your breath and prayed you’d be the death of him.
you bring out the fear in me,
the fear of God’s eyelash. you give this living
a life of loving left laying on the lie of this world, leaning.
thank you for being
so goddamned
inexplicable
for making me think about you so hard.
i went to church today,
and left two pills of advil for god.
at the altar, i said a prayer for him,
that he will not turn to narcotics or lonely nights of drinking wine
in his empty room, or that a song won’t play on the radio
or in heaven and remind him
of when he was young
and it was okay
it was okay
to make
mistakes.