socially awkward.

(116)

clavicola:

A star slit its throat on the moon tonight, 
bled over its white basin and watched the color drain from its skin.

My English teacher calls those who read poetry sensitive, 
so maybe it’s not my fault that the smallest things break me, 
not my fault that even my blood cells are cracking like glass. 

My words have become fractures as of late, splintered bones, 
dark skeletons of lost poems and journeys home from places
where love sinks underneath the floorboards.

I can’t concentrate on these letters, on the way that
I’m supposed to draw out I love you’s into five-hundred character stationary.
I can only look at your nouns and say verbs. I can only look at
your skin and see coordinates for a place I’d like to call Ours, 

because there’s nothing more honest than loving in fragments, 
than cuts in the riverbank and the broken bottles that wash up
as sea glass beaches. There’s nothing more to it than the way
a lover can interject a kiss by telling you that you’re beautiful
or the way my skin is paused by tree lines, the way
my fingertips spread out like deltas into flesh-toned seas.  

Last night the moon was a bloodied red and today I painted
my lips the same color. On my way home at one in the morning
from God know’s where, time was cut off by a passerby, and change
scattered between us like broken words. When I looked into her eyes
I saw two full moons that she had stolen from streetlights. 

Everything is getting muddied these days.

Streetlights in eyes and verbs in places of nouns.
Words are broken mechanisms and 
I’m leaning on language as a weak-ankled crutch, 

but with pen against page I can still hear my blood cells cracking;
breaking; with each comma, 
I fracture.