"Sleep was created by sad people, I’m sure.
At 4am with your breath on my forearm I can
see the haziness of sadness in your eyes,
like a hallucination, except I’m not
hallucinating, and in the afternoon
you will go for walks, and it will rain,
and I’ll be in bed and it will be three o’clock
in the afternoon, and the curtains will be drawn,
and it will look like nighttime,
and you will say “it looks like nighttime”
as you dab my eyes and mascara comes
away on the tissue like black water.
There is lots of salt in my mind
and I will try my hardest not to cry
but eventually my mouth will quiver
in that weird way and you will say
“it looks like nighttime”
and in the early mornings you will ride the subway
to the end of the subway line and come back
tired, broken, and bruised,
and I’ll ask “what happened out there”
and you will say the rain looks
like black water and later in the nighttime
with your breath on my forearm
I’ll try my hardest not to cry
and it will feel like morning
with the absence of sun and the skies
and I’ll play sad music
written by melancholic twenty-something-year-olds
and I will think about crying and you will think about
that girl you loved when you
were fifteen who didn’t love you back and
In the darkness with the curtains drawn I’ll lay
in bed at three o’clock in the afternoon
staring at your white ceiling and you will
say “it feels like nighttime” and we’ll
both look at the clock but we won’t
say anything about time."