You try to make them just like you
Half-empty glasses of unrealized potential
So that maybe it doesn’t hurt so bad
That you just peaked early

You’re the only one who cares
That you’ll never be nothing enough
Scratching your favorite song lyrics on bullets
You’re too scared to put in your brain

The thing about a love language is
We never get taught the rules
How to diagram a love sentence
What part of speech is acts of service

So when love languages differ
It's a natural thing
How could you understand
a dialect you've never heard?

Why do we lie to each other
If truth would serve us better
Little white lies we tell
Like “I love you”
When we both know that
I don’t love you anymore
And you never loved me in the first place

Beauty
You are ripe on the branch.
I reach to grab you
But I am not a tall man.

Lover
You are ripe on the branch.
I shake the tree
But you do not fall.

Angel
You are ripe on the branch.
I cry out to you
But you cannot hear.

Oh my love
I try to tell you but
I don’t have the words for your beauty
Not like they do
Your lips ripe plums
Your skin the color of your drink
Oro

I thought about what you said
About your life
Whether it was worth living
And the sky opened up for you

I think about you, little fairy
Flitting about in the sky
Above the clouds
Where the rain can’t touch you

I’ll be in my bunk
I joke without lying
Reading Neruda’s Sonnet 17
I wonder if he somehow knew us
Or if love is just ineffable like that

I always thought I understood time
The inexorable march forward
A monotonic function from birth to death
Each ticking second measured by atomic clock
But now I worry I never understood
How many weeks are in twenty years?
Somehow, fewer than there are in two months.

What use did the world have for love songs before you were born?
Thousands of hollow words, spoken into the wind that all sprang to life one day.
You were always their purpose.

Did they know what they were making with you?
Your porcelain skin and wonder-filled eyes
Beauty ripped from poetry
I’ve scaled the walls around your fragile heart
Fallen from them countless times
For eighteen years
I’ve watched them grow and crumble
Besieged by forces old and new

Which Carolina are you in now
And his name is Matt, right?
Or is it Nick?
Wherever you are
I’m sure you’re reading a book
A work of contemporary fiction
Something Melissa Broder would like
And you can return it to the library
With dogeared pages
Just like me

#poetry #poetrysky #poem

Unfortunately, yes.

Like a Lana Del Rey song
Sexy and miserable and haunting and
Everyone thinks you were written just for them

my bitey poem, bitch, was accepted to be published in the @trashlightpress.bsky.social notes app poetry series 🖤 catch it july 29

I like it better when you’re gone
So I can chase the phantom of who I want you to be
Instead of being haunted by who you are