If I could, I would write him sunsets

that drip like water colors into the ocean.

But these days I mostly just drop my pen

into the water because I know

that no words I have to offer are going to be as beautiful

as the golden state of mind he left me for.

 

I used to take Sharpies and scribble

poems into my hands until there were no empty spaces,

so that when I ran my fingers over his skin

the smudges wouldn't come off

until I kissed them

the same way the angels kissed each of the stars

to give them their shine.

 

Ask me how I got these scars

and I'll tell you it was because I took the cherry of a cigarette

to every last millimeter of skin

that he had touched

in an attempt to get his cologne out of my thighs

and burnt the broken dreams stuck to dirty sheets

because they said that his smells was causing the lack of sleep,

and the lack of sleep was what

was making me go crazy

 

but I dare you to stand on the edge of rooftops,

trying to find forever, and not go crazy,

because I found it on lazy Sunday mornings

when he read my body like a poem,

when he promised to be there always,

when he said that there was something that looked a lot like forever

on the back of my eyes.

I found it on nights that we drove too fast through empty streets

while outracing father time

and I found it buried between the blankets and sheets

in rushed kisses before parents had time to see

in the way our raw, papercut pulses managed to sync together

to pound out

each beat in time too fast.

 

I dare you to try loving someone

even in the spaces

between breaths and heartbeats

in every nook and cranny

where a cliché can be found

and try

not to be crazy.

 

The last night I saw him,

he told me that at some point,

it had just gotten to hard to care.

And I told him I understood.

I asked him to tell me about the big city lights

that shine like stars

that fell from the sky

and to give me some shitty line about

the curve of the moon as it smiled over the tired shoreline.

I told him I knew I was never

the wind beneath his wings,

that I knew I was little more

than the end of a song that refused to get out of his head

that he'd sometimes hum on his morning train ride to the city.

I knew that, if we were being honest,

he'd always been a little greater than.

And me, I'd always been a little less than

and there wasn't a whole lot more to it than that.

 

But I'd have torn off a pane of sky for him

I'd hate cut constellations from soup cans

one by one

till my fingers trembled and bled

till the earth's gravitational pull was tilted

to the left,

where my heart's pounding had still not slowed.

I'd have fallen off the flat edge of the world,

if it meant making him stay.

 

But really, I meant it when I said I understood

that it just got too hard to care.