this was not a love story.

if i could, i'd get you in a cardboard box -- duct-tape shut the hanging cardboard. cut us off from the oxygen. breathe into your mouth so you wouldn't have to inhale anything else.

-- and tell you, in between breaths, tell you in whispers and secrets, with still life hanging all around us.

e v e r y t h i n g

i can, everything i remember...

...stories and folklore i can never have you know. 

because memory doesn't falter -- won't blur years o' missing you, all partitions and glass and lies of you,

all broken and lingering poltergeist moments.

fingers thrown wholly into hair, fingers fisted and tightened and burning against brick walls and panes of glass.

if i could, i'd burn you to the ground with clichés so pedestrian they taste bitter. send sparks flying around you, send flames passing in and out of your head -- like  

i love&love you and i can't believe i 

and and-- and watch them lick and burn you, watch them slide into your veins and.

. "my boy, my gorgeous boy, mine because when god set the traps and laid out the tests he shaped you and i as one and slammed our identical figurines into dazed jolted teenage skin"

drifting surf-sky flirts with malboro red and dank bruised purple, settles languidly on an ocean of corflower blues.

i watch and hope

we were never a love story

like an affirmation, like a life raft, like a shrine.