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“His voice became taut as he ran his hand down his jawline and back to the mug in front of him. It was empty, but he held onto it like the warmth from the black coffee hadn’t left it and stared into the bottom as if looking for a world beyond where he was. 

'Tell me,' he breathed, 'was it your mother or your ex-lover who first taught you that you ought to be afraid of heights?
Who told you that the fall would be so bad?
Do you ever think it’s unfair to let others around you jump when you can’t even work up the courage to climb down the ladder to catch them at the bottom? Forget falling as fast as I did, but did you even look over the edge?'
Her breath caught in her throat as she fought tears and opened her mouth to explain as he cut her off,

'Who taught you that you should fear the places you try to forget instead of making peace with them?
Why won’t you tell me about your grandmother’s house or where you spent eighth grade?
Why do you feel like you can’t heal or forget or at least be comfortable with the reality that you never want to go back?
Why do you feel more at home in a city full of strangers than in a room with people you’ve grown up with and how come you won’t let me be your comfort?
Is it really so bad that you’d rather spend a night in a city that never sleeps instead of a night in with me?
How did it get to this point of uncertainty?
How did I not see this coming?'
He cleared his throat as he tapped his fingers against his mug, placing each finger against the ceramic as though it were the neck of a guitar. When he spoke again it was thin,

'Where did you learn to have a high-speed come apart every time things are looking up?'
His chin lowered but his eyes stayed on her face, pleading for so much as a change in her expression but she remained silent, the lump in her throat threatening tears at any second. 
Finally he croaked,
'I just wish to be the place your heart finds solace, I just want to give your soul a rest. I know it’s cliché but I just want to be your favorite.'"
Paint me pretty, paint me bright,
Capture me in this adoring light.
Wish as you may, wish as you might,
Thing will never be as they are tonight.
Baby blue, cotton candy pink,
A yellow that pales next to my smile, you think.
Never a portrait, always a scene,
Easier to forget if I'm just a color scheme.
Lavender because it's my favorite scent,
Green to reflect how my irises glint.
Willows, weeping, for all that's been lost,
A field once vast now covered in frost.
When they look at the paintings what do they see?
Water lilies and bridges, never me.
Try as they will, try as they might,
only love makes you wonder at this sight.
kissing you was like swerving into oncoming traffic

i can never tell if i am more haunted by empty picture frames or the ashes of their contents

you taught me that the saying "pick your battles" meant not answering when love was at the door

sometimes when i drink whiskey i swear i can hear your voice in the creases of my bedsheets & i sleep on the floor

i still catch myself running my hands over things you touched the most, looking for the echoes of your fingertips

i practice things i'll never say to you

i remember the day you told me you didn't like poetry, how "everything's already been said" & how "nothing meaningful can be captured without being cliche" you know, i don't miss you like the sun and moon, i do not miss you like tide bent waves crashing on the shoreline, i miss you like a chernobyl  swingset misses children

rumor has it that drowning is a lot like coming home, that drinking bleach can **** the butterflies in your stomach

for your love of cigarettes, i would have been an ashtray

this halloween i want to dress up as the you when you loved yourself and show up on your doorstep

i never understood what you meant when you said i was an instrument, back when you would cup your hands around my chest and breathe through the holes in my heart, i still wonder if the sounds i made remind you of wind chimes

i never paid much attention to abandoned buildings until i became one

in my dreams all the flowers smell like your perfume

i am the only person who has ever wished for the same snowflake to fall twice

if i could go back, and rewrite the definition of audacity, it would be how when we lost the bet of love, you said "we never shook on it"

i love you, if the feeling is not mutual, please pretend this was a poem

the only apology i want from you, is to have you repeat the names of children we will never have in your parents living room until they *****

we are the same person if you find yourself up at 4am dry heaving promises, or if you are kept awake by the laughter of those who've abandoned you

nobody ever told you that goodbyes taste like the back of stamps

sometimes i'm convinced that the only reason we hug, is so you can check my back for exit wounds
The only pink house on the street,
Vulnerable.
I dreamt about being lost,
But I was free to be who I want.
Like the dock that seemed to be hiding under the water,
Confused.
Unlike the small turtle crossing the road alone,
I have real friends.
The wildflowers that sprout along the main road
Must be self-conscious like the people who were evicted from apartment 66.
Independence,
Like Christmas lights in mid-July.
"I can't stop drinking about you"
Am I supposed to see that as romantic?
Am I supposed to hear that and cry and say I'm sorry?
Realize that you must miss me so much you can't even bear the thought of me, that you have to drown our memories in a bottle of alcohol because you'd rather forget than remember,
That looking back on loving me was so awful the only the you can do is drink your life away,
Like I wasn't real, like the pain isn't present, like I'm not left with the ruins of what we once were,
Except I'm doing it sober.
You aren't being romantic,
I will not come back to you because you can't find the strength to deal with pain without being drunk.
If I come back, you will be the same person just dealing with an alcohol addiction now and I will be left to pick up after you while trying to hold myself together because nothing has changed for the better.
Do not sit there and tell me you want me back, use the argument that drunk words are sober thoughts,
I will not listen when you say that you still love me
Because if you still loved me you would've picked up the phone first instead of the bottle and you would've shown me that you cared instead of sending me drunk texts;
If you really loved me you'd want me to be happy,
If you really loved me you would make an effort,
If you really loved me I wouldn't hear about how you got so drunk last weekend you blacked out and how you haven't gone to church since "we" ended.
"Gotta stay high to keep you off my mind"
Like packing a bowl will erase the memory of me packing my bags, like lighting a spliff will burn all our memories,
As if I'm something you don't want to remember,
But remember, that what goes up must come down,
And I hope that you choke on the smoke of your third joint today because every time you come down off your high you face the pain again and every time it gets a little worse because you never deal with it, don't you realize that things left untouched tend to pile up,
Just stop.
Didn't you know that for every joint you rolled up I rolled out another two layers of skin just to show you it didn't hurt me,
Didn't you know that as the **** hit you it also hit me but like a punch to the gut instead of euphoria because it was another time I wasn't worth being sober,
You should have known it would never make me happy.
I do not think its romantic I think it's pathetic,
And I won't come running back because you tell me you can't handle being without me.
If you couldn't handle being without me you'd make an effort to be back with me but with every **** you take another step away,
And every step away is another straw,
I'm down to one but I'm sure by the end of tonight it will be none,
You should know that romancing me never involved a substance.
Pretty (adj):
1. pleasing or attractive to the eye, as by delicacy or gracefulness;
"Pretty" is a word that's been spewed at you since the day you were born,
A social standard set upon you that you had yet to even hear, but it was being used to describe you instantly;
A "pretty little girl", a "pretty face", "pretty eyes", "pretty smile", "pretty outfit",
Did anyone ever stop to wonder if you'd have a pretty soul?
What about the way you could be brought to tears at the thought of shaming homeless people or victims of abuse, how your heart felt like it was ripping out of your chest when you heard about someone who was struggling,
They didn't seem to care that you tested highest in compassion, they just wanted to know where you got your dress from.
As you grew older the adjective turned from an innocent compliment to what seemed like a snide remark,
The word "pretty" began to eat you from the inside out every time it was said
like you should measure your worth in how delicate others find you;
You stopped accepting "pretty" as a compliment when it turned into an adjective that was only associated with girls that were more than average but less than beautiful,
You stopped accepting "pretty" as a compliment when it became an antonym of strong,
like "pretty" girls were things that would break if you talked too loud, as if loving a "pretty" thing could never be synonymous with loving a durable or sturdy or resilient thing.
D.A. Sharp once said
"You weren't meant to be pretty; you were meant to burn down the earth and graffiti the sky. Don't let anyone ever simplify you to just "pretty"."
And so when someone kindly placed the word in a sentence referring to you you learned to automatically put it into quotations because they were just trying to be nice,
They didn't know they were reducing you to outer beauty, that "pretty" seemed less like a compliment the more it was said, like people couldn't figure out another way to describe you,
As if God hadn't already intricately woven the threads of your DNA, as if he hadn't perfectly tinted every hair on your head to be its crisp burnt color or hand painted the irises of your eyes,
No, "pretty" could no longer cut it.
Because you had been made for bigger and better things,
Those "pretty" eyes of yours will one day see things that God hadn't originally intended anyone to have to see, and those "pretty" hands of yours will have to pick up the pieces of a heartache that God had never wanted you to know and put them back together, and those "pretty" lips of yours are the same lips that will stand in front of sin and tell it that you have chosen Jesus.
Because "pretty" is fine,
but you have been fearfully and wonderfully made, a masterpiece of the Creator.
this won me first place in a spoken word performance!
Vulnerable
Like the small turtle crossing the road alone.
Confused
Like having Christmas lights out in mid-July.
Self-conscious
Like the dock that seemed to be hiding under the water rather than conquering it.
I dreamt about being lost
Like the people in apartment 66 who have been evicted
Free to be the person I want to be
Like the wildflowers that sprout along the road.
Independence here
Like the only pink house on Hoffman Street.
Real friends
Like being part of a flock,
Like being part of a town,
Like being a part of my Poughkeepsie.
Walk-around poem, a poem i wrote while in Poughkeepsie New York which incorporates both feelings and unusual things i had noticed
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