I can't help but notice you, Charlie—

everything about you.

That numb look of yours in History,

like a shadowy space between two young lovers,

now dead in the wildfire.

The curve of your lips tries to summon a smile.

But all it can do is draw a ghost of a mirage,

like the slow smoke of my midnight cigarettes.

The sun burns brown in your eyes, oh Charlie,

how can you not know I've been

in immense love with your heart years since?

There's nothing much about you.

Yet a thousand waves crash on the brown shades

of your wide eyes—a fevered pull to hold you closer.

I once painted a sketch of yours with

the colors of the morning sky rising from the ashes

and your favorite novel leaving

silver-lined stars and coiled memories behind its way.

It's raining mid-winter.

You're wearing the same sweater,

I got you on your fifteenth birthday.

There's a single butterfly knitted, and we

once named it "Always and Forever."

Now I see your eyes and think

that the portrait's color is slowly fading

into my thin blue flesh. Candles sigh in the room.

A gentle caress of the violet snow conjures

an unholy hymn, "Nevermore."

Oh, Charlie, how could you

steal my stars and fill my eyes with smoke?

Because all I see is you and your eyes,

And I hated that more than anything else.

I do not paint anymore.

The soft earth beneath my feet

enfolds till I vanish.

We have been living in a lie, Charlie.

Flecks of charcoal dust faint into

murmurs of death and dying.

The colors have now vanished into

the yellow bones of my mibs—how pitifully dark.

My fingers are bloodless in your blood-stained thoughts.

The ashes of my postcards now smear my feet,

and suddenly I feel too cold.

I've been hurting myself while hurting you.

Memory's a lie to line our story.

An unfinished ending to a finished chapter.

We're a brief mirage of catastrophe

frozen in the dying time and falling moon.

You have a broken heart, and I have a dying soul.

I wonder if love could ever happen in

the infinite spaces between your favorite poetry lines.

Because Charlie, you're made of poetry and me of hunger.

And we'll remain dead beneath the depths of hell until forever.

Oh, Charlie, I hope there's nothing left for us to forget or forgive.

Except ourselves.