(even though I’ve told you
before that my tear ducts were
taped shut by my own doing).

There were things you knew by heart,
and things I taught you;  like how
I like strawberries dipped in chocolate
(even though I can’t eat them in public)
and how I got that scar on my stomach
and how I pull bodies to me like
sheets that keep me warm at night
but only manage to keep myself

covered until the sun comes up
in the morning, and how I’m
still mourning the parts of me
I leave unwillingly on strangers’ skin
and how I used to be an optimist
before I became a depressed realist
and how the masochist in me
seems to have found a safe

haven in the way you avoid
eye contact even when your fingers
are kissing mine under the blanket
and how when you asked me to leave
my hand behind before I got on
a plane, I confused it for another
part of my anatomy.
And I would ask you not to expect much

from me but there’s so much
I want to give you -
and you say,
“I want to be like you for a day,
just so I can know how it
feels like to be numb without
having to take my medication“.

But I feel it all.

*

I will pretend I don’t notice the
wetness on your cheeks after you brush
me off your teeth and you will realize
that I now realize that
even though you are not mine
your lips had told me otherwise
when they kissed the arch of my back
the night before
(and please just tell me you noticed that
our bodies fit together like
the ocean to the shore
and that your sand
has made itself a home at my very core).

*

I’m sorry I don’t know how to want you gracefully, and I’m sorry that my desperation for you stinks up every room I enter, and I’m sorry I was the hurricane that shattered the calm after your storm, and I’m sorry that I poured a bucket of ice on your already cold feet. But the forces that bind me to you are the very same forces that bind the Earth to the Sun and my only excuse is that I was trying to cool the fire in your chest, and my chest, but the closer I got the more the two of us burned.

*

Love is sin enough, but loving you
will leave me eternally unredeemable.

    I don’t want to want you,

    but I really do.

I want that fire in your eyes to
turn a dull shade of blue
every time you get your saddened hands to
wave good-bye.
I want you finding that weak spot
on my shoulder without having to try
and giggling like a child
on a sugar high,
I want to kiss away your shy side
until darkness
is no longer necessary
for you and I
to lock eyes.
My blinding light,
I want you toes curling
and tongue-tied,
I want you realizing
I’ve set your vocal chords
free,
as you bite into the sheets
to muffle your screams,
I want you doing those things
you said you wished you could do to me,
I want you shaky-kneed
breathing
please stay
    don’t leave
right into my mouth,
where only I can taste you
and hear you.
I want to guide you, and steer you
into the gates of hell where the
flames themselves will blister
from the burning fire that is
the two of us,
I want you to call us “us”
and savor the sweetness of the word
before you smack your own lips
at your carelessness.
My heaven-sent,
I want to tell you how I think
your hypnotizing hips
are actually made of God’s
favorite symphony, and when it’s played,
how I’m certain that the whole universe
fucking bows and breaks at your
divinity,
I want you to break me
the way you do every time you feel like
solving me,
the way you piece back a goddamn puzzle.

I don’t know how you put me back together.
I’m the girl who confessed her cynicism
at “forever”,
I’m the girl who promised never to pen any love-letters,
and this again is not a letter,
this is a confession of sleep-deprived hands that
didn’t know any better,
these are the silent whisperings of fingers whose tips
have grown addicted to the feel of the insides of your lips.
My lover,
I tasted melancholy on your shoulder
that night I held you against my chest
and begged the sky
to either grant me another kiss
before I lose myself to this restlessness
or just shake the heaviness in my breath
that comes with the very mention of your glorious name.
My never again,
you asked me not to leave any traces
of this sweet sin on your honey-dipped skin,
so instead I bit my tongue and poured my blues
into your morning coffee
and never told you why that last breakfast
had your chest so heavy and full of aching.

I hope that secret hickey I left on the walls
of your heart
stays put.

“you are perfection“

and the words tickle my fingers the way your tongue tickled my
ears that first night I wrote you in and
I must admit
you not only breathed life
into me; you resuscitated a
a word that seemed to escape me
lifetimes ago.

And I will swear on your deity of choice
that I still feel a hundred pretty yous sitting on my chest.

until that heaviness became my
second nature.

I was really moved by that scene

where they filmed her desperately wishing
she was just in the confines of
another one of her nightmares -

where they shot a close-up

of her

shattering

to pieces,

and you just stood there and dubbed her heartless.

I am writing through you to you because
you are the only things that are capable of making a poet
fall to her knees -
and I
don’t claim to be a poet
in a way
Wordsworth or Plath
would approve of,
but my knees are scuffed and bloody for you,
and because of you.
     Words, I found you in the darkness
when all I needed was something to
sink my teeth into, when all I wanted
was something to dig my nails
in night after night

but you clogged my arteries,
and you traveled up my spine like chills;

tugging at the very fibers of my existence,
and you made sure to seduce me when
all I had
to pride myself with was my
independence -
when I was the queen of avoiding attachment
to strings that dangled so persistently before my eyes,
and yet I soon found your threads
forming webs all over and around me,
claiming me victim,
claiming the start of a one-sided
addiction and dependency.
My dear words, all you desired was to
seep out
of my ink-blotted pores and into these
beautiful and naked
pages of books I called my second skin -
and all I wanted was to keep you inside me,
to keep you rolling over and under my tongue,
until I memorized the way you tasted,
until I could confidently say
I knew you well.
But these gracious pieces of paper were
always more than just silent leaves
where I left you to rest;

they were crime scenes.

They were incriminating evidence of nights I laid my body atop
these notebooks and was stabbed by the need to
exorcise these phrases from my soul until
I bled black ink
in the shape of letters.
But you shaped me unsatisfied
and you stabbed me only when you pleased,
and you promised me solace
each time, but you always just left me there
on my knees.
Me
on the floor
with remnants of the alphabet
under my nails and unworded stories hiding
under my bones. Every time I tried to breathe them
out and pull them into the light,
I always found more of you than I originally anticipated.

Like ribbons from a clown’s lips,

I could never guess the colors or
the damage you’ll do or undo to me.
But you keep leaving me with eyes like
neon signs screaming

 ”This is not enough; this is never enough”.

Always wanting more;
always needing that one last verse or that
one last stanza to complete me. Some twisted
love affair we’ve had, you made me whole only
to make me feel more hollow.  I’ve always been fascinated at how
that intense and electrifying sense of ecstasy
you bestow so generously upon me
flees away so hastily before I can fully drink it down.
But I’ll still ask you to keep driving me to insanity,
words - I will beg of you.
Because, my words, you’ll always find a way to
make me sane again.

If only for a little while.

Forever your lover,
forever your obedient slave,

Hala.

  but I don’t remember walking over you.

Your sorrow weighs on me
like a mischievous ray of
light demanding attention
on a sleepless night, and
I’d rather just pull the covers
over my head and pretend it’s
not there -

but you shine it right into
my eyes.

So I say
I’m sorry she broke
your heart,
and you ask
me why I’m so dead inside.

I suspect you’re genuinely curious.

The fact of the matter is;
you’re beautiful
and
I’m scared of you.

In a way that
left us wondering
how we would tell apart
those beautifully
similar parts.

But you;

my noble savior.

You, with that cape on your back;
you picked all the pieces
off the floor and built me
up in parts of me and you,
and
brick by brick,
you completed me,
you broke your damn back until
you made me whole,
until I overflowed,
until there was excess,
until you stood there
a mere half,
looking at the you and the me,
inside me,
realizing I’d become taller
than you remembered
and that there
was a certain bitterness,
a strange sense of
loss that comes with
being the hero.

But don’t you know, my sweet?

Heroes don’t live here.
And heroes change their minds.
And heroes can break you
all over again,
just by falling apart before your eyes.