paper-forests

april 1st i just sat there words lodged in my throat eyes burning with tears that i wasn't going to let escape while you broke into pieces i couldn't fix. april 2nd you gave me stained fingertips the same colour as your belly. i still dont know if its from your poorly rolled mentol's or if its the colour of the deepest regret i've ever felt. april 3rd. i tried to write this poetically. with oceans and stars and metaphors so large i lose connection. but i can't some things just aren't poetic. april 4th. you're body was black and blue but oh god there was colour. there was colour. and colour means life. right? even if its clinging on

 its easier to say "i'm fine, just tired" than explain the water rising when really they just asked out of politeness and don't -actually- care.

the person I love loves music much too much and the person I love loves that I love the quiet and easy days loves that I like to stay up late (or early) till the birds sing of morning and the person I love loves that I love to hold hands and hold a body but only when I know them fully and the person I love loves listening to my songs and listening to my voice and to my poetry and stories the person I love has songs to share too and a voice that melts my heart and words that mold it back into something nostalgia old and inspired new and the person I love loves to look around and take it in once in a while and wonders why we can’t just r

cause i know there are days when it's painful to even breathe, your throat closing up on the knowledge that you don't know how much longer you'll be waiting on this band-aided, superglued planet. every cell in your body vying to be the next to die, and all you have to tell them is maybe. maybe next time. those are the days you spend cutting rose thorns into your palms and clenching your fists tight around jagged reflections and prismed rainbows. the days you realize we're losing so much faster than we're learning. we're maturing faster than we're growing. adults stuck in the bodies of kids, moving around, making the mistake

the sting of something cheap swiftly followed by the bittersweet acidic kiss of a sugared lime: He says to me, he says it again and again—I'm not leaving you, I'm making a path for you to follow—He says it on a tongue like syrup sticking to the zest of his lips, another dry-mouthed confession leaving sweet thick saliva on the corners of his mouth. His face is etched with the shadows of a late summer afternoon, who molasses-crawl with passing clouds and place their sleepy passion onto him— heavy-lidded lethargy pockmarked by staccato letters; siempre pasas por mi mente, Hermanito—He trips over his consonants and slurs his vowels into on

 my chest is hollow after he scraped it out with his tongue and fingertips.  his movements were sharp and intricate, like a surgeon, removing a tumor.  i could feel pieces in me break under his touch, yet he swallows the fragments as if they were lost travelers trying to wander out of his dark, cavernous interior.  i'm being stripped bare, inside and out.  he's filling himself with me, a bag of bone fragments and blood clots for his consumption. he left with my insides, left the hole gaping open and prone to infection.  "i'll return them in a week," he says, referring to the pieces of me that he has hidden himself in.  but a week without par

when you left for the very last time, the bruises on my neck still hadn't faded. i was naked amongst the evergreens, shades of blues and greens pushing against my skin, the sky paling me with the gray-teal of sunset's afterglow. as you forced yourself upon me, you insisted on reasons that made no sense, yet the echoes of your words resonated through my mind, so loud that i couldn't hear reason. later people said that it was my body. "it got the better of him," they said. i am shutting down, only a fragment of my old self. i can feel my body becoming dormant, for now. the bird in my chest is long gone, after all, you killed it.