all boundaries are conventions.

“Take a body, dump it, drive. Take a body, maybe your own, and dump it gently. All your dead, unfinished selves and dump them gently.”

“I still write poems for you the same way other people bring flowers to graves.”

“I’m in love with my anger / my war-won body / tense and vicious.”

“I looked for love in things that were not love.”

Under your hands, I bloom into ache– and heat and want. And heavy breath and mouth and mouth and mouth. I melt, all syrup on your fingers. You could almost spin me into candy floss, except for this weight on your hips: this body and how it buckles for your body.

i glow the way unwanted things do, a neon sign that reads; come, i still taste like someone else’s mouth.

You love her like you’re only just learning to breathe. I think if Zeus were on the prowl for a new girl’s heart to break, she’d be the first to fall prey. She, like Helen of Troy, has a beauty like the new honeybees of rain-drenched spring. She’s got a heart like rubbing alcohol, like cleaning fluid, & it’s better not to touch it. She doesn’t do much, sits by the phone decaying for want of you. She rots & startles herself with her anger. She is not gentle nor kind, but a serpent hiding in Eve’s most sacred garden. She doesn’t even know that it isn’t the right place for her. She is not law; she is religion. She is tearing me at the seams for want of something more & it’s bloody & painful & all worth it for her smile. She’s hungry & split-lip sullen. She loves you because she’s reckless — she loves you because she doesn’t know any better.

Grief, I’ve learned, is really love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot give. The more you loved someone, the more you grieve. All of that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes and in that part of your chest that gets empty and hollow feeling. The happiness of love turns to sadness when unspent. Grief is just love with no place to go.

Here it is then, the dark thing, the dark thing you have waited for so long.