i am not in love with you
the birds outside my window are car horns
that silver layer coating the desk is not dust
my feet aren't cold 
     not even in these shoes
     that aren't falling apart at the
     soles
this paper has a fingercut
term paper was done five days ago
i slept dreamlessly last night.
when i woke up, i decided to be a pacifist with my past
    i've forgiven all the people who hurt me
it snowed in North Carolina & finals week was canceled;
so was the last day of this semester
     i get to keep this corner dorm room forever, with all the silence of the late
     night buses
​i'm not terrified of heights, the dark, or people 
    who try to hug me
and i don't miss my grandpa 
    or any of his songs
    especially since his body still lives at my house and his mind,
    busy being elsewhere
America is the land of the free & the home of marked graves
    a queer woman is President and she looks like me 
    no one asked her where she was really from when she moved into high office
    & the White House was painted rainbow this morning 
someone asked how i was doing today 
    and stayed to hear the truth
and most wondrous and splendidly excellent of all
i am still not in love with you

dreamt of old loves,
original songs,
crosses & secret languages,
fetuses in bags that i cradle and sing to,
old men chasing me—wanting to own me, 
hitting the red panic button by accident, but not really
top floor of a crisis center,
climbing down a crack in the floor into a damp subway platform,
bodies are scattered all over the tracks, their untimely deaths unpeopling their skeletons
     taking the strain off their tired frames 
a train pulls into the station and i 
think about getting onboard

i woke up and still felt 
asleep
the morning can be such a nightmare

there's a pretty girl in my mirror
she has bed head
and two stray pimples
one eyebrow on fleek
the other can't decide which direction to 
fly off to for the summer 
mouth full and flushed with 
drool and dreams
she winks, then tells me,

​"how glorious it is to be alive." 

if i were an eraser
i'd be lopsided with good intentions
and misguided with guilt 
i'd praise the blank page
the do-evers
the rage quits
the ghost that once populated your phone with 
sweet before-bed messages 
i'd help you forget 
or pretend to not know those gray smudges
that remind you of Billy Joel,
scraped knees,
belt buckles,
unkissed cheeks & unresolved arguments,
apologies that choked to death in your throat
alongside the corpses of the word, "no"
and the word, "yes"
and the hope that you'd learn how to let your eyes
smile again
i'd rub myself raw trying to convince you that 
the safest place is nowhere
not even inside of yourself 
that perfect takes giving up and looking for
an alternative way to fuck up,
repeat
that uncertainty is a way of life and
regret is a body
to embrace mistakes only as a chance to
play yourself like a game and cheat 
code your way to victory
though, the only way to win is to lose to yourself too
so maybe just pause life indefinitely
maybe just restart the board
scatter the pieces 
then throw them away
faster, faster, repeat, erase
i'd leave a trail of blanks behind 
like a gun that won't stop firing 
won't stop triggering until
i'm empty 
until i've disappe

i didn't feel like 
writing poetry today
maybe i'll go dance

it scares me to fall so fast for you
you stole the scream from my lungs 
my lungs have never been so breathless
breathless kisses in the lamplight disappears everything
everything i know is spinning away & i don't know when my good sense will be back
back then, i never saw you coming either
either i'd have backed from the edge or jumped sooner
sooner, i'd learn to swim or drown

how is it so easy for you to 
cut me loose
set our love free
to be eaten by untamed things
at midnight by the hanging tree
i thought your eyes were windows to
your soul so when they curtained
i thought it—your soul—was asleep
when in fact it had packed its bags and
moved back into his mother's house
and when i knocked on the front door
the cardboard artifice crumbled
and revealed the empty spaces you'd left
behind
i've searched for you since so that i could return them to you
i'm sure you'd want this barrenness back

friends make sure friends eat
ice cream when nightmares refuse
to stay in the dark

hangovers aren't so bad
i know this because they haven't stopped my friends
from drinking
​i say this because i want to be drunk one day
i want to go soft in your arms
i want my hair to be everywhere
and we're both laughing
full of punch lines and mouthfuls of each other
​not a single moment
wasted
only the buzz of tension from couch springs
wheezing at our stumbling tongues
we become inarticulate 
but the need to stretch this night is clear
there may not be another again
who knows what the morning will bring
all that sunlight might be bright enough to burn our eyes
that see each other so honestly 
the thunder of migraines might shake us awake
and dry out our mouths so that nothing comes out right
but rain will carry it all away eventually
so we risk it