If You Take A Chance On Me I Promise I Won’t Wreck This

I am not very good at falling in love —
I can leap into it like a rocket vaulting into space
My feet are meteors that heave themselves from the ground up
but the fire beneath them burns out before they reach the top
There is no other way to say this
so I tell you I love you in Braille when we are on the couch
scrawling the alphabet into each other’s tongues
I say,
“You are the most beautiful thing I have ever laid eyes on”
But I am an exit sign with a light that never goes out
and there is a kind of wildfire within me that you will confuse for desire
What I mean is
I never quite learned how to take things slow
I always count the ashes before I have even ignited the flame

But this time I don’t want to run
There is something about you that makes me want to plant my feet on the ground so that they don’t act as skyrockets
hurling upwards and then subsiding
with an eventual rapid downfall
I want to know how it feels to walk beside you in a normal pace
I want to tread around you like you are open water
and then dive in without thinking I am going to drown

I guess you could say I am romanticizing this
because I am blaming the planets and the moon and the stars for their alignment, for leading me to you
and because my bones have turned into a shooting cannon
constantly flinging themselves towards you
I know it’s pathetic
But my lungs have become an open casket
and I am folding inward like a dead spider,
a moon flower,
all the metaphors that collide inside of me
all of a sudden make sense

Because you see,
I am not very good at falling in love —
No, I launch into it like missiles darting into open air
I sink my hands into boiling water until they deteriorate
because lukewarm tastes a lot like melancholy
in silk sheets
But you
There is something about you
There is something that makes me want to stay
And I want to learn how to become the ocean
instead of the flame.