Screw falling in love.

My heart itself is already in tangles. A web of nonsense
and a drawerful of necklace chains that I will never
have the patience to separate. I am sounds mixed with
different mediums of light. Six thousand eight hundred
dialects of flesh that I don’t have enough time to
translate into words. This dictionary of skin is unreadable and
Latin is dead because of what we never had the balls to
tell each other.

I am swearing off of love because everything inside of me
is oil and vinegar and I no longer believe that it’s morally correct
to fall in love with the intent of both destroying and rebuilding
another human being. I am a forest fire and an ocean, and
my favorite color is the same as the color that hurts me the most.

I don’t want your sentimentality. Quit looking at me intending
to melt me. We all know it’s working. We all know what this heart
is capable of unfolding.

I am not as strong as my words pretend to be. Not
as quiet as these caesuras promise. This heart is a patchwork quilt of people
that leave different shades of blue inside of me.

The drowning. Your skies.
The outline of a blue jay on a porcelain plate.

For now, I am closing off these bones for someone who will know
how to trace me without me ever telling them what I look like naked.

I no longer want to seduce the words out of people just to see
if I can. The love that I’m looking for falls out of the realm of your lips
and my lips and our lips doing a dance that involves bodies and more skin
and your hair touching mine, gently, like two winds
colliding.

Screw falling in love.

It’s too much to handle when
I’m already having difficulties breathing and keeping track of my
heartbeats and making sure that my limbs are doing what
they need to be doing.

But,
men are so beautiful.

But this heart is so
fragile.

I am every vulnerability that the thesaurus has to
offer me and in a certain light it’s impossible for me not to pull you
towards me with the intent of kissing the very life
out of you.

What I’m trying to say is that you are not allowed in.
What I’m trying to say is that all I want is to open myself up and have you
rearrange me, untangle the gold chains of my heart, love me for
every shade of blue that I have hidden in the silent spaces
between parentheses.

I have sworn off of falling in love,

but I know that in the morning,
outside, in the pale frost of February,

all I’ll want is to hold another person’s hand, warm and
gloved, in their coat’s pocket.

Shinji Moon