If only the letting go of

we're as simple as

letting go enough

to fall head into

the bushes,

more of a stumble

than it was

a graceful reckoning.

This love was never heroic,

the coward was thrown out

of the blankets

but it was the only thing

outside of the sheets

we twisted between our limbs.

I could have ran away,

It would have shown

my courage more

than staying ever did.

A song that was written

but never sung

echoes in the chambers,

through the passageways,

down the street

where I walk

with it still

singing

the love

for you.

What made me

wasn't a pair of hands

or the work

of an artist

painting colors

on a white canvas,

it wasn't a matter of fate,

in the way fate makes destiny.

It was all the things,

the mothers who didn't know

they were mothering me,

the friends that drew

the figure in the mirror.

It was the bit by bit,

the hits, the squeezes,

the touch that could stop time,

the smolder, the cold,

the lost moments

staring me in the face.

It was the everything,

only made possible

by ma and pa.

They made me,

they didn't,

but they made it real

The border

line fades

into the sweet

softness of

your gaze.

My heart

beats into

the words

spoken

truly for

only your

ears to hear.

It's a veil

that I cover

my eyes with,

made with lace,

made to make

all the things

you do, all

the half

truths,

make

them

look

like

love.

I won't give this

up just yet,

it's still sweet,

tender,

real. I won't

give it up,

but I know

I have to

give up

on you.

Promptly I settled into the bar,

the cigarette lit, the drink ordered,

the scene now a world around me.

My roommate's lying cheating ex

making the drinks and ignoring me

the way I ignore him.

The bartender from a bar downtown

that I have a crush on, ignoring me

the way I ignore him before leaving

with a cute girl with black hair

inches shorter than him.

Now I'm nobody to be ignored,

just an item of the scene until

my friend arrives.

We'll talk when she gets here.

A day of rain and coffee and cigarettes

rolled to its end into a sky full

of blue clouds and an acid red sunset.

I sit on the porch looking out

at it, at my life, at what I can make of it.

I live in a place I don't want to look at

anymore, or feel anymore.

I want to lose it the way I've lost everything else, like sand that slid

through my fingers. A surface just

slippery enough to grasp the things

it cannot hold.

But tonight, as I look at a sunset I

don't want to see, it smiles

something at me.

That boy is in the sky.

The boy that is the reason

I know loss and the reason

that I know love.

And he looks at me through

the clouds and it pierced me.

I have lost my brother here.

There it is looking at me, looking at me

just the way that I am,

broken, and lost, and tired.

And it finds me like this,

withered on my porch.

And the it occurs to me to see the way that beauty looks down on me,

not forgetting me, not forgetting us,

but bringing me back to you.

A moment that cannot be lost

or forgotten, but slips away nonetheless.

I remember now, how losing you

brought me here to this sunset,

your sunset.

Love.