I sit and smoke here tonight with thoughts of you cascading through the slips of my heart. I have held you and I can't imagine how I lived without it before. A feeding-back of your vibrations now and forever necessary. Don't you see? The outline of your arms is dug so very deeply into me. Your head buried into my shoulder, your nose breathing me in. I carved it out for you so you would always fit.

I set aside bricks and built graves for the wanderers that tried to nip at my neck. I carried poison in my brain but you carried the antidote and spread it across states and valleys and junkyards and wonderlands. How easily you have made it to love you. How focused and steady you have been with my barks. I'm a foolish sucker but you love my laugh and that makes the tears less salty. That makes the years less faulty and the beers less malty. I got broken thumbs but I swear I'll learn to play whatever song you like if you promise to sing it with me. I got a lot of ghosts that still try to linger but I tell them the same thing I tell the sorrow when it tries to claim my horizons: You don't see the moon like we do.

And they vanish through a whisp of smokey death just like I hope they do. They always return, but I still always tell them. A constant reminder, dealt a constant reminder.

I am silent when we walk and speak, not because I'm bored or uninspired, or because I'm telling the ghosts to go away, or because I have reservations in my head. I am silent because I am whole. I hear more of everything, see so much more clearly the steady movement of life just being by next to you. I am silent because for once I am able to listen.

You once grabbed me by the shoulders, turned me around and looked me in the eyes and told me you loved me over and over again and not once did I see you hesitate before the next. Not once did I see a fault in your locked in gaze. I felt an overwhelming need to know why you would make this so special, as if you were planning to leave, but you really actually did it because of me. Because love made you do it.

Don't you see? I thought poets only wrote about this kind of thing. I tried to play a new game, thinking if I abused myself long enough and showed everyone what it looked like with sleepy stanzas then eventually no one would know how I felt anymore, and it'd be then that I'd won. For some reason you somehow show everyone all my cards right before I go all-in. For some reason because of you I'm no longer capable of bluffing and I don't care.

I have won.