Emily's Candy

Good Literature

The sun is in love with me.
She is in love with the words printed on my flesh.
She kisses my skin and skims over the stanzas stapled there.

I want to feel the warmth of your arms wrapped around my body,
I want to run my hands through the sunrise red hair on your head
and cling to you as though I am solar powered battery,
but before you can ever get too close,
I hide,
find a crevice in a bookshelf,
and blanket myself
away from you.

You are a star too beautiful to be
with the likes of me.
Everytime you touch me,
I feel my bones deteriorating
piece by piece
until there is nothing left in my body but white ash that collects at my fingertips
and slides down the interior of my skin as though I were an hourglass.
It is a miracle my teeth haven't been blown away by the wind yet.

Your voice is a song I never want to stop listening to.
You are a melody I heard,
drunk
in the backseat of a car on a blurry day,
and looked for everywhere.
Searched you up online,
typed the few lyrics I could remember of you on Youtube
and asked the entire population of the human race if they knew your name.

When I strum the strings of my broken guitar in unison with the crescendo of your grand piano,
I break
the perfect, untouched rhythm your fingers created and gifted to the world
with a stuttering voice,
sputtering cheap lies and sad stanzas.

Sometimes I think
I need a cat to be shoved down my throat so it can scratch my vocal chords when I talk.
Or maybe,
I should put those damn teeth to use before the wind steals them from me
and bite my tongue off.

You look at me like you've known me your whole life,
like I am a memoir that you cannot wait to flip through.

I would invite you to read but I am afraid of criticism
and you are the last person I want a bad review from,
so I will shut myself away and hide in a bookshelf.

Do not touch me,
your beauty will saw away all the awful things in me,
and you will have to face the reality that there is nothing
but awful things in me:
Ash.

Do not speak to me,
I will never get you out of my head.
I will strum a broken guitar
to disguise the noise but I will always be wondering.

Do not look at me.
Not too close,
if you look at these memoirs too close,
the sun might never return to the morning. 

But mostly,
I am afraid of you.
No,
I am afraid of me,
loving you.
Because if I know myself,
and trust me,
I know myself,
I have read myself,
I have tried to edit and re-edit myself,
I will break
this
bad.

I do not deserve your embrace,
the bubbling warmth in my chest when you hold me.

I do not deserve your voice,
the soothing, humming sound of your words as they leave your mouth.

I do not deserve your smile,
the bright sunrise of my abysmal routine.

I am a poorly written and recited prose a pretentious poet wrote
while stoned.
I could mark you up in paper cuts
or eclipse you with the end of my page,
paint sadness.

And still,
when that sunrise smile of yours blesses this nightly earth,
as though it is worth igniting,
and your light shines upon my spine,
despite me hiding in the
crevices of that book shelf,
you will scan through every other novel pressed against me,
find my dusty body,
shove away the air's debris that has collected on my leather skin,
and read me.