My friend Derrick says love is the only war worth dying for. But every time I say, “please come back”, I feel like I”m trying to find a dirty needle in a haystack, and God knows I can’t go out like that. I suppose we wear our traumas the way the guillotine wears gravity. Our lovers’ necks are so soft. I lost my head so many times. I got sober just hoping my eyes would dry. Still, I drink so much in my sleep, I can’t sleepwalk a straight line to the guest room or collapse, hang so heavy inside her lungs. 

She speaks and her voice trips across her heartbeat, each word limps into the air. We are gone, she says. And I am no mortician; I have no idea how to put make-up on the dead. I have no idea how to unerase, so I just puddle at the door, my face looking like a deck of falling cards, like everything’s been playing me. We tried so hard. But when I said “give me a ring”, she thought I meant a call. Now I haven’t had her number for two years. We’ve been saying how many times are we going to keep cutting these red flags into valentines. You know, all those wars we fought have turned our shine into rust, we can’t even touch each other’s hearts without a tetanus shot.

We can’t begin to remember how we forgot there is no shelter in the womb. The heart forms long before the ribcage. My mother swore she could feel me kicking weeks before my feet formed. That’s how hard my heart beat — and it still does. They say the womb is where we learn love is knowing the cord that feeds you could at any moment wrap around your neck. I hold my breath for the entire 56 seconds it takes her to walk to the window to stare at the road to tell me she has nothing left to tell me, we are done, carrying our level heads in our tornado chests.

For the first time, I know she is right. As the dawn, after our first date, we were so young, and I hadn’t written an honest love poem yet. I hadn’t met anyone I could fall so hard for ‘til the night we kissed on our skateboards, she teased me for going so slow. I said I never want to catch up with the letting go. I want the plead in my throat to forever anger my spine and the seams of your slippers, love, even when the dove crashed through the window, even when our friends said, you can call it love, but you know Einstein called himself a pacifist when he built the bomb.

When they ask why we stayed together for so long I say, I don’t know. I just know that we cried at the exact same time in every movie. I know we blushed everyday for the first two years. I know I always stole the covers and she never woke me up.

I know the exact look on her face, the first night she used my toothbrush. The next day, I brushed my teeth like thirtysome times, ‘cause I didn’t want to let her go. You have to understand when it hurt to love her, it hurt the way the light hurts your eyes in the middle of the night, but I had to see, even through the ruin, if what we were burying were seeds. There were so many plants in our house, you could rake the leaves even through that winter when I was trying to make angels in the snow of her cold shoulder. She was still leaving love notes in my suitcase; I’d always find them.

The day before I left, I remembered a story her mother told me. She said: ‘Andrea, when Heather was a little girl, she couldn’t fall asleep without tying a string around her finger that stretched to mine in the other room. All night long she’d  give that string the tiniest tug, to make sure I was still there, and I’d tug back. That was love. That was love. As easy as that.’

Sometimes. 

Sometimes. 

(As transcribed from the version of the poem in this video. Subtle changes in The Madness Vase book and on the Flower Boy album.)

If you see her,
Tell her it doesn’t snow in Colorado.
Tell her all that stuff falling from the sky is just sawdust from the stilts I’ve been carving for my short temper.
Tell her there’s a tambourine in my chest,
and yes, she still shakes me.
Too bad love is an Etch-a-Sketch; good thing love is an Etch-a-Sketch.
If you see her, tell her I’ve been running towards my life like Laura Ingalls running down that hill in her flowered dress.
I wore a flowered dress to my birthday boy party.
Don’t look at me like that.
I’m not the box the gift came in.
This heart is my Sunday best,
grass-stained from the day I discovered her neck tasted like the reed of my first saxophone.
If I could still play,
I’d play the softest song
a moth in the lamplight
a snow globe, turning upside down
Michelle Obama buttoning her husband’s bulletproof vest.
We are all fragile,
and fraying, praying
we can hold the tire swing through the summer.
My mood swings
with its feet dangling in the river
so when my sadness
reaches the ocean it turns to salt.
If you see her, tell her the moon is all her fault.
Love, a trap door of light: even when it’s gone, it’s somewhere.
Tonight, I buried her time capsule in the ball field,
for every time running for home meant running towards her.
Next time, I will know to listen
when the umpire tells me I’m safe. Next time,
I will know it’s normal
to have a hard time breathing when you shake the dust.
We make everything so complicated.
Sometimes, the message in the bottle
is “Don’t drink so much — there’s too much Novocaine in our wisdom teeth already.”
Every window begs to be open when the storm comes.
I dig seed holes in my pillow and dream of clock towers whistling at the lightning
This upside-down umbrella is a teacup for God
The puddles in my eyes are monuments of grief crumbling beneath moss.
You can spend your whole life
wearing a life vest in the desert;
it took me so long
to burn those fire escapes
but I know neither of us
are only the felonies on our record players.
I know the music
we were trying to make.
Every one of us
is a Mack truck
with a soft bed inside.
I got my thumb out on the highway,
and I know
she doesn’t drive this way.
If you see her,
Tell her I made a song from the dial tone.
I made a paper-mâché glider plane from our unfinished poem.
Take the elevator to the parking garage rooftop,
take a cigar box full of feather pens and write what you see.
The bassinet of my mouth unfurling its ribbons to raise my voice honest honestly.
She was an anthem.
I was a stadium full of patriots with their hands on their hearts.
Honestly
my hand is still on my heart
as the fireworks announce the end of the game
and the colors in the sky chase the birds inside.
Have you seen the nest they are building
from everything
we left behind.

I think it would be more fun if I could meet people who love her just as much as I do!