I am breaking along the back of twenty-three,

Midnight, a moondrunk dance and is that me pouring across the floor, blind-shattered light?

A falter in the dark, soles slip against the concrete and my soul slips too,

But I only know how to tend to the places that do not hurt.

Touch me tender and I will cry,

Empty my eyes until I am light enough to float into the sky.

Stars melt between the cracks in my fingers, and this is the loneliest place in the world.

To be always freezing or frozen,

To be always caught in moments that will never be anything but lost –

The moments that were made only for the remembering.

I am dirtiest when I want to be clean,

When the weight of shame clings so heavy against this skin;

It becomes a world of my own draped across my shoulders.

All soft bone and lost words in the broken places,

An empty that calls only my name.

I try to spit it out when I realize that is I who am screaming,

But by then my mouth is dirty – and it is dead.

Perhaps it is I that am the tainted thing, the dirty thing, the dead thing.

I am all backwards inconsistencies and forgetting how to mean it when I breathe.

Sometimes I am forgetting how to breathe at all.

I am the moment of silence that follows the goodbye;

Saudade is tattooed on my hand and I watch it fade against the vomit.

The love that remains after someone is gone,

It breaks me in half to know that someday it will be lost too.