I am worn and tattered on the edges, yet I breathe light into the atmosphere. I am the echo of something that once was a shadow of beautiful and now departed into something destructive. I am poison dripping through your veins and into your heart. Please listen to me: run. Run before I masticate the pavement and it’s too late for you to get out alive. Run before I destroy you too. Just run.

You must know that no matter what happens, no hellfire could keep me from lifting you up from your demons and your heavy burdens.  The thought of you hurting already shreds my insides and shatters my bones. Dig your fingers into my skin and scream into me. Crush me and allow everything you’ve got to pass into me. Allow me to be your canary in this toxic void. My barely beating heart is now tethered to your broken, black one. Never ask me to leave unless it is with you. Do not ask me to run unless  it is next to you.

I am an underground landmine and I am exploding under your bare feet. I am a coal mine that is imploding around your skeleton causing each endearing, somatic cell to rupture. You are beautiful and I am ugly. All of the most touching words in the world will not change our reality. You deserve a luscious, velvety-smile and glass of love instead of this concrete barricade I have built. You should have something warm and enticing but I can only give you a chipped glass that is half empty. Do not try and fix me when you should destroy me, not when I destroyed you.

You have hammered these fragile bones with every laugh, fortifying my resolve, strengthening my spine and forging me into your personal Goliath. I walk through your starfire bursts and channeling deeper into your naked soul without a scratch, only scarring me deeper with concern. You are more than a chipped glass; I see you as uncut diamonds. I am just made of steel, iron and rock but you my dear are untamed fire.  You break me down but seamlessly build me up into something better and worthy of you.

I want you although I shouldn’t. I need you but I can’t have you. You are the kind of love I keep hidden behind my heart, buried between my lungs and tucked under my tongue. You are a secret that I cannot even tell myself because I cannot trust myself  with you. Do not trust my starving soul to not simply swallow you whole; I am ravenous for all you are. Please, run my love, run before I am no longer strong enough to save you….from myself.

All you need is strength and I will hold up us both. Slip your hand into mine and close your eyes. Wrap your sylph arms around me, bury your head into my chest but do not breathe. This secret I will keep and you will never have to know, that even if you consume my flesh, bone and soul….I will just creep into your veins so that sixty times a minute I can fill (and yes feel) your heart beat then breathe life into your limbs and press you forward. Forever.

I am leaning on you with weakened legs while clinging to you with fingers crumbling to dust. I selfishly want you here. I was hateful but still need you. Press your truth upon my skin and shape lies against my lips. Then maybe I will believe I won’t die each night. Press your fingers into the spaces along my spine to help me stand. Press your heart into the empty space of my chest to help me remember how to live. Help me.

I will sweep you into my arms so your broken body can be healed again. I will carry you through this self-made barron desert as my hands, lips and breath will hold you together. I will whisper all the truths about secrets that lay in your eyes. I will show you the embers burning beneath your own skin to remind you how to pull your own phoenix limbs from the ashes of this midnight disaster. I will show you that you can trust and I will never let you fall again. When I know the time is right, I will admit to you that, like oxygen and dreams….I need you too.

I may need you, oh yes I do, but I cannot trust you. Even as I am falling against you, I do not believe. I have been caught before and then left to drop; by you. My spine has kissed my skull until the blood licked my neck. Fate has crushed me with its fingers and allowed destiny to draw the knife against my tender flesh. So when I let you hold me, do not be surprised when I am tense like an arrow’s bow just waiting to be snap. Just waiting for that breath before disaster. 

I can prove to you these are more than just masquerade promises dancing off my tongue. If my body absorbs a thousand arrows that you have fired at me in fear, then I will take a thousand times infinity more to show you that I can. My fingers will never let you sleep and my grip will not falter. I will hold you up until I am not needed anymore. When you are once more standing on the mountaintops, and swimming through the water drenched clouds, opening your mouth and crying out a song of contentment. Until you are bathing in the sunrise and sipping nectar of the stars. You do not have to trust me or even love me but I will never let go.

Please hold me tight against the waves of your chest and ignore my begging mouth. Ignore my fingers clawing at you and my teeth clenched in my devil-mouth. Just hold me against your skin to let me remember what it is like to feel human again. I want to feel my old fire coursing through my veins, racing down my nervous system like a heart attack. Kiss me until I am breathless and I am nothing but lips, hands and desire. Love me until my pulse quickens and I can breathe once more. Please love me.

I give you my arms, lips and body; please take them. Fall into my hurricane heart and see what it is like to be the start of something beautiful and the end of a broken city of hopes and dreams. We collide like ions and scream through the sky. Feel the friction of our bodies as you it starts a spark in your toes and surges through your body, lighting you up inside. I am loving you until these flashes push your heart into the sky, slamming it into the clouds and start a downpour. I will love you until all these storms around us are over and when the world is broken but growing anew. The only sound left will be our steady breathing as the clouds pass away; whatever happens I will love you.