just leave me your stardust to remember me by.

i sent you my heart in a box,
the postman promised to have you sign
on the dotted line
before entrusting it to you
but maybe he forgot
or maybe he just decided that it wasn’t worth the time
but either way i’m here
and you are there
in this age of television blues and artificial coloring shot with needles
into our artificial conversations
i could tell you that i miss you but my words would come up empty
because anyone can say them
and it doesn’t really mean much
i remember when our words turned into touch
and i could feel the ache of all the things you couldn’t say
compressed into the space between your fingers and your breath
that lit the darkness sparking daylight into the street lamps
of these broken asphalt creeks
each dotted yellow line another sign of just how far away from me you are
and i can’t make myself pretend
that this is right and this is easy
and when did simple become so complicated
and when did all the right sayings become so cheesy
and those three words became the preface
to sweaty palms and cold dead hearts
because the kind of love i look for isn’t artificial love
the love that becomes cancer, eating away at us like
 boys and girls becoming the masters of each others hearts
 turning beating organs into tools of mass destruction
 when did we step away from all that we became
running back into ourselves
into the things that we forgot
into things we promised in our darkest dimmest hours that we would never  be.
why is it so easy to take off our clothes
and so much harder to open our hearts?
or maybe they are one and the same
our silence screaming
“know me and love me because of it
or maybe despite it.
hold my hand with all it scars and all its battle wounds
the outside signs of all that we have overcome
because hearts can’t scar
the same way palms do,”
the way your hands shook the day you let go of my heart
and let me on my own and told me it was better
and told me i was stronger than i thought
but these are things i knew already
things i felt when my heart beat steady
and words came easy, when my feet found rhythm
on the sidewalks of your shoes, my heart all tied up in your laces
and the sun illuminating both our freckled faces.
those were the days before fear swept in on the back of a
tv commercial promising love and selling promises
the day before you left me that note in shaky handwriting,
“i can’t know you and love you the same”,
when the red sunrise became the color of my
beating heart flayed raw and aching,
when i scooped the fragile remnants into a cardboard box,
addressed it to your name and made the postman promise.
the weeks turned months where i pressed my face against the
windowpane and waited for your answer,
then realized that the silence was your answer
and maybe we are all just cardboard boxes
holding aching bleeding hearts
stamped over again with the places we’ve seen
and the people we’ve known, pasted with those little signs that tell us
“handle with care”
but who listens to those? not me.
i left my heart in a cardboard box in the postman’s hands
and maybe someday he’ll show up on your doorstep and ask you to sign
but you’d better know it is a great responsibility
because hearts don’t just break,
sometimes they heal.