There are snowflakes on my tongue
I want to melt on your inner thigh.
There’s a face in the moon
I still call Jesus some nights.
My body is a temple where I’ve burned so many sciptures
I see smoke every time I look in the mirror.

Kiss me where the flames turned blue.
Tell me there are places on my skin
that look exactly like the sky
and your heart is a jet plane
heavy with the weight of businessmen and crying babies
but you’re done running for the exit row.

‘Cause god knows we have smoked the stars,
made wishes on falling ashes.
Something’s gotta give,
it may as well be your fingers.
Touch me ‘till my ribs become piano keys,
‘till there is sheet music scrolled across the inside of my lungs
cause i’m breaking old patterns.
For anyone else I would rhyme and end this line with Saturn,
but you are not the type to wear rings,
and I’m not the type to want to celebrate forever
when Right Now is forever walking down the aisles unnoticed.

Hold me.
Sing me lullabies at dawn
when I’ve been up all night painting the wind
to remind myself that things are moving.

We were talking mountains and snowboards
when you said, “I’ll teach you how to fall.”

I said, ‘I bet you will.’
But my bruises will be half-moons
hanging above corn fields
that grow only crop circles.
You are a mystery I promise I will never try to solve.
What science calls science I have always called miracle
and since we first met I have said “thank you” so many times
I have watched all of my broken pieces
curling into notes to plant themselves
in the soil of clarinets on the street corners
in the French Quarter
you can find music
in places where you cannot find air.

So when you say you are homesick for my skin
my body sends you postcards from all its darkest corners
and prays you will still see the sun
climbing my bones like octaves,
‘cause baby, there were nights when my pulse did not win,
nights when my heartbeat stained the kitchen floor
bright red.

But you once told me
we are most alive in the split second before death,
so I call ‘ugly’ a four letter word
and tell you I am tired of hearing myself swear.

Beauty
is in the eye of the beholder.
You hold me so well
that I am almost convinced
that smoke in the mirror
might one day disappear.