i'm a difficult boy.

if let you’d let me swallow down
your heart of solid
gold, to cure the black
inside my soul – if we were
one, instead of two,
i believe i could find some
love inside of me.

because i’m a difficult boy to talk to;
with a mind full of
deteriorating memoirs of
pills, love, abuse, and
chaotic
alternate memories. i’m a body
frozen in the grips
of a thousand incidents,
of a million standalone car
“accidents” – molded by amber resin
that holds my limbs shock-still

in a stagnant pool of my stepfather’s
fingerprints.

because i’m a difficult boy to hold;
with thoughts full of girls in racy
garments and lace barely covering
their breasts, when
in reality
i’m gay –
with burned-into-my-head screams, and recollections
of a gory childhood i experience every time
someone loses their temper
or drags fingernails
across my forehead; of the beautiful, independent
heart i thought i had

tucked in between my mother’s
diary entries.

because i’m a difficult boy to trust;
with my volatile mood swings
and frostbitten outlook on life – on the
life i love so much, with
not enough disdain for rapists
but just enough for
liars dressed habitually in wolf’s clothing. i crave
love, of any kind (agape, eros, and yes,
even philia, but mostly
just eros), but yours
is the

chisel cracking into the amber
resin my limbs have
been seemingly cemented in;

but your breaths are the summer heat
boiling my perception
back from
tissue death;

your liquid-fire blood
is the medicine i swallow to
let my moods
relax;

the words that spill from
your throat
are enough to convince me
that your lexica of thoughtless romance
is enough to quell
the monsters even i’ve
birthed;

and the ribs that harbor
both my heart and yours
are the rhyme to
my shattered rhythm;

living to break,
but to never be broken;

breathing to hate,
but to never begin hating;

crying to release my fragmented mind,
but to never cry alone;

it’s difficult.

but that’s okay,
because i’m a difficult boy to love,
and you love me anyway.