Walking in fiction
and conversing 
with the crows.
How many times
can I fall in love
with you this week?

I can fill the voids
with sound and noise,
the plucking of strings
and the lull of the destroyed.
And even if my heart
should swell and shatter
I could tease apart the wreckage
from the things that matter.
This fervent desire 
for passionate kisses
separates the hunger
from the pain of missing you.

Leave my body for 
the wild beasts - 
I want for nothing
except your hands
on my skin
and my feet in the mud.
All your colours of
grass stains and bruises
and dandelion freckles
pressed against white scars
and dirty fingernails.
We cannot be hurt
by the fighting
of birds and bees,
we cannot be hurt
by sins like these.
I would rather be
torn to pieces and 
left in your arms
than not know the feeling
of salt water waves
and pokenoboy spines.

If I cannot be good,
I want to be nothing.

When she was six years old,
she took a pair of her mother's scissors
and chopped off her brown locks
in an act of childhood defiance.
"It's only hair"
                      they said,
"it will grow back."
It took a year,
                         but it did.

When she was fourteen years old,
she took out her anger on her body
and used the sharpest objects she could find
to trace her self-loathing in her flesh.
"It's only skin"
                       they said,
"it will grow back."
And it wasn't perfect,
                                        but it did.

When she was twenty-one years old,
she took a course on ethics
and asked if the forest were cut down
in displays of power, not production.
"They're only trees"
                     they said,
"they will grow back."
But there wasn't time,
                                         so they didn't.

I am aware of how
our bodies fit together
like continents and currents;
we smash against each other
in a struggle to find equilibrium
through a constancy of force.
Over time, more of what I thought
were immutable parts of myself
become enveloped by this,
an incessant crashing,
until they are worn away 
and dissolved into the depths.
What is there to do
except thrust upwards into mountains
and infinitely drift?

You tell me you love me like a volcano, 
with affection bubbling and bursting
through your fissures and splitting your
exterior until it streams down your sides
and swallows our surroundings
with such burning intensity
that all those around us are blinded.
You show you love me in eruptions, 
unexpected molten kisses that explode 
with such force that the world trembles
and my skin smolders and blisters.

Your love renders me charcoal and ash
and I can not be loved like that -
I can not love like that.
I am carbon and cinders.
I can not love you like lava,
your love leaves me unable
 to love anything at all.

I like to think of us
as two beautiful colours
that didn't belong 
in the same painting,
and while we each were capable
of holding our own,
there was something
about us being together
that was...
ugly.

Or maybe,
I'm just trying to justify
why it took so long
for both of us to realize
that we weren't only on different pages,
but reading different books
in different languages,
in different libraries,
separated by oceans.

I wish, sometimes,
that there were
easier ways to tell
someone that when
they are near it feels
like time stops; or that,
if you were a bird,
your heart would beat
so fast when they touch
you that your body would
simply crumble to the floor
and give out in a pile of
feathers and hollow bones.

I know that you're American,
but if you look past
my maple syrup skin
and frosty igloo grin
I think you'd find that
we're more than kind of similar:
your signature smirk
works as well on me
as it did on any of those
New York beauty queens,
and maybe you could see
that, despite our nationalities,
we could have a love story
worthy of the big screen.