just another adolescent love poem

let’s get this straight right now:
there are people i can only talk to
at four o’clock in the morning, when
the line between decency and secrecy
becomes just as blurred as the one between
night and day.
you’re not one of them.
i’m not ashamed of you.

or scared. and don’t try to tell me that’s not
a miracle because i still check under the bed
for monsters and behind the shower curtain
for serial killers. i know it’s all in my head
but things like that make me terrified;
i mean, i still hold my breath crossing by a cemetery
and someone else is always going to have to kill the spiders.

i’m hoping that someone will be you.

which i’m also hoping i’ll never accidentally tell you
because it’s like i lose all cognitive reasoning
around you, even when we’re fighting.
you split me down the middle, half of me wanting
to tear out your femur and beat some sense into you
and the other half wanting to give anything,
even the foundations of the home i’ve built inside of me,
to keep that fire in you
burning.

i want to drive alone with you,
and i know we won’t be alone because we’d
be together, i know i won’t be alone because we’d be
together. but i wanna rearrange my definition of the word
alone until it’s made for two because
i think maybe i could spend the rest of my
life like this, driving down back country
roads that still aren’t paved and making
fun of the sun and the universe and the college advisor
and the compass i still haven’t
torn out of my dashboard and the stars
that fall and the stars that don’t
and the stars that get sent to rehab and the ones who slowly burn out
and all the other things we don’t know shit about.

if you don’t get it yet, i’m trying to tell you i love you,
i just don’t know how and it’s not like
i’ve spent years choking back these words
because i’ve never even completely formed them.
i’m too terrified to.
and i don’t think that’s something you can understand,
unless you’ve ever had a secret live so long inside of you
that it digs an ocean in the middle of your body
with a low tide that feels like a drought
and scratches stars on the outsides of your bones
in constellations that no one remembers anymore.
trust me, i know that i love you’s are hard to let go of,
even when they’re your own.

so if you ever catch me
staring at you like you hung the moon and
electric-chair’ed the sun, that’s why.