you have to stop

you have to stop.

looking at me, pinning me in place innocuously with those eyes.

a butterfly beneath glass.

for you, its fleeting. a courtesy.

but i am starved, in want of you,

so it becomes a seashell memory i put in my dwindling jar.

you have to stop.

you have no business dripping my name from your lips,

casually,

if that is the only part of me that will ever hang there.

i'd rather never hear it from you again if it would spare me the exquisite torture of wanting, so badly, to hear you say it again

just

once

more

you have to stop.

laughing so much, so freely, making me think of ways i could make you do it again. wishing i was the reason for it in the first place.

you have to stop with this in between, for i am the wing of a dragonfly, a wineglass in a drunken hand, the petal of a flower, a whispered oath.

easily broken.

you have to stop this in between, this nothing but maybe, not yet but almost-

you have to stop.

you, with your summer breeze voice, constellation eyes, river rapid laugh.

you must love me, or you must leave.

or you'll be the shattering of me.