Tread water
Feel human again
They watched you
Find solace in rubber bands
And you've fought to
Hide them inside your hands

Feel it fall off of your shoulders
And burn like your last cigarette

Lie in wait
For the final chance
Wonder if your peace
Looks just like your regrets
So close to bliss
Or feeling anything again

Blurring faces
Easy enough to forget
What's unchanging
What blows away in the wind
What are just moments
Permanence sneaks inside your head

And feel it fall off of your shoulders
And burn like your last cigarette
Wither away with the embers
Could've been better than this

Lie in wait
For the final chance
Wonder if your peace
Looks just like your regrets
So close to bliss
Or feeling anything again

I want to stay
I want to stay

My grandmother still has a picture of you on her fridge

I came here for a breath of fresh air

Just to find you hiding in all of the corners of my life

We call men like you

Detwi Lapè

First kiss
Like fireworks exploding inside of me
I wonder if you feel sad today too?
I can't just be a distant memory
What do I do with this
Overwhelming
and overflowing
I feel you all around me still like a ghost
But the memory is inescapable
Gunpowder explodes
Your breath is on my neck
Thousands of colors and lights
Whispered I love yous
This torture chamber echoing endlessly

You are like them
Explosive and angry
And absolutely stunning

On this day at dawn i rise
The clouds painted
In shades of pink and blue
My lips turn up at their corners
For i can’t help but smile
At a sky like this

The birds greet me with a song
Their morning chatter dances in my eardrums
Like they’re calling out for me
To join their choir

The sun starts to peek over the horizon and it Seems for one moment
In the chaos of this life
Everything is still

I reach for my lover’s hand
And I know he won’t be there
To close his fingers in between my own
But I gently shut my eyes
And imagine
He is here to share with me
A peek behind the pearly gates
This little slice of heaven

My first lover and I were far too alike
We gave everything too fast, and collided at high speeds
And I am still not able to find the words to describe how deeply it wrecked me
And how, if I cannot even comprehend this complete destruction, am I supposed to pick up the pieces?

Well obviously, I cannot be empty
I cannot simply learn to exist alongside the hollow hands that torture me
Oh
How their fingers curl into my chest cavity
Scraping my insides out
And they don’t give a **** what I do to end these violent crimes
They just sink inside of me deeper
And refuse to leave me here alone
Oh
How it aches like broken bones
And leaves a throbbing in my skull

When the nightmares begin to consume my body and soul, I begin to tear pieces of myself away, handing them out like tokens
At least then, I get to be the perpetrator.
The one in control of  repeating cycles of constant anxiety and perpetual uncertainty

I stand motionless and unseeing, breathless at his front door in the middle of the night
I memorize the curves of his mind and welcome the hollow hands to cut me into the perfect shapes to understand his perspective

Tirelessly, I bleed out for love that, somewhere in the back of my mind, I know barely feels good enough to waste my bandages on

I search for feeling like I am endlessly pursuing
I obsess over those who leave too many butterflies in my stomach, with wings beating so intensely I feel they are clawing up my neck and silently exploding out of my throat

The lingering belief that it is our privilege be a chapter in the book and never the hard earned happy ending
Comes from a smaller version of myself

She believes that we should be grateful to have breathed every ounce of our life into another until we could no longer feel the rise and fall of our lungs

She believes we are lucky to be destroyed over and over again
Then to never have loved in the first place

I'm on the corner of a street my feet know how to navigate well
From many times Ive traveled here to scan the faces in the crosswalk
In the beginning I avoided this place in hopes the sickness in my stomach could cease for a little while
But as time went on the days became lonelier
And on those days I wandered here
So I could feel nervous again
Longing for my heart to catch in my throat when I see his lips
Or his nose on a different face
Hoping that the sound of your voice will float into my body
and bring me back to life once again
But Ive had no luck so far
So for today I tell myself
"Rest now."
And forget about the tireless search for a familiar smile
When I settle on his eyes I'm mercilessly tossed away into their oceans in ways that I never thought possible
Reality slips away
Leaving nothing but my tunnel vision of him
I race through the gardens of his mind and see
Where I had once broken off a piece of myself
And hidden it inside of him
A piece of me I knew would not be forgotten forever
But that I might not ever be able to find
I'm not expecting to come face to face with so suddenly
And I'm thrown into his orbit once again
My resolve disappears like his cigarette smoke
For that moment I am sixteen again
Catching his gaze across the lawn
The color of his eyes so indicative of mine
His insides are so vulnerable to me
When he sees me
I know he finds the piece he had buried inside of me too

I am just five years old
Unable to escape knowing too much
I cannot tell why everything is so heavy
But still I choose to carry it
I am just twelve years old
Splitting open my skin
Under the guise of control
And dripping with self disgust
Screaming at the world
DOES ANYONE HEAR ME
PLEASE
CAN ANYONE SEE ME
PLEASE
I DON'T WANT TO DIE
I am just fifteen years old
Lying because I can
And getting away with it too
Touched by the wrong hands
Empty inside
And I'm not sure that I care
Even when I return to my bed and do not feel safe inside of it
At least somebody is touching me
I am just eighteen years old
My fathers words exploding out of my mouth
I hate the way I used to speak to my mother

At almost twenty years old
I have learned to swallow my self loathing

I cannot unbecome her
I cannot **** her
I can only embrace her

I'm sorry

tattoos swim around Her arms in delicate waves
and i think Her glasses are too big for Her face
and i still think She is pretty
we never locked eyes the first time
but somehow I knew it was Her
indeed it was hard to forget lips locked together
while i watched on You held her like a love song
and explosions rocked my shores with storms and tidal waves
Her shoes are filthy
like You
i guess that's why You like her
i just cant help the cruelty that tumbles out of my mouth
broken people breaking others
its like these hands write on their own
You
drenched in red and purple light
much too beautiful to stare directly at
much like the sun
but i squint and struggle still
while Your light completely consumes me
Your gaze travels
You
***** preacher in search of His scandalous lover
your eyes find Her
You smile
and so does She

There are years worth of puncture wounds on his soul
Does he feel them with every rise and fall of his chest?
Someone knew exactly where to scar him
So that nobody would see how much burden he has been left to carry
I am close enough to know that everything is not as easy as he makes it out to be
Sometimes when he holds me and I run my fingers through his hair
I think her hands might’ve found the same place atop his head
One day they still may
But for now he unwillingly holds this heaviness

I plead sometimes
Let me take it from him
Just for a little while

Softly seeping into a rhythm of uncertainty

And unknowingly a soft summer breeze

Turns into a turbulent and terrifying tornado

I pretend I am an avid consumer of literature

Of Frost of Whitman and Angelou

Yet I couldn’t comprehend the shift in the weather

Or it could have been that I did not want to understand

How sunlight stinging the back of my eyelids

Could become puddles soaking through my socks

And ruining my favorite sneakers

Alas I skipped joyfully home

With the memory of sunshine in my pocket

And rain flooding the gutters

I can't help it when I look into his eyes

When he tells me that his mother's middle name was Theresa
That he loves the smell of the supermarket and snow
And that he doesn't like the taste of pickles
Because they're too sour for his tongue
When he tells me that he's never loved a woman like me before
I want to know everything he has tucked away under those sapphire stones

If I am not careful about my choices
I will continue clinging to the edge
Afraid and unwilling to see what lies beyond

There are unspoken questions that linger

How much am I willing to die for you?
How much will I bleed?
How much control can I relinquish?

Who am I if not yours?

How am I supposed to love freely
Knowing that sacrificing all of myself
Is the only way to have only half of you?

Is this all my life was meant to be?
Deciding over and over again
If you are worth suffering endlessly

There are many things wrong with this picture
The lines are drawn in the wrong directions
And they are too sharp for the image I am trying to paint
Safety and comfort

Regurgitate my motivations
And spit them back at me
The debate will never be if the way it tastes is exactly the way I meant it to
The question lies in the question I cannot answer for myself

Do I deserve it?
Am I an angry
Snarling
Selfish creature
With long talons that destroy the world around me
The one I have tirelessly tried to paint for myself
Could I be so selfish?
Could I be so cruel?
Do I claw at the walls and scream at the sky when the house around me burns down into ashes
While a shadowy figure like myself is setting the place alight?
It lingers in the corner of my mind
And fights to be the only thing I think about
Is it I or the monster who would love to push it away?
Dissociating from this creature is the only way to control her
Surely
I couldn't be this evil

Now this restless night
All is familiar
But not quite the same as before

Sure
There were the dreams
But the way you smelled
And the sound of your voice
Has been slipping away from me for months

Now this restless night
My trembling body closes its eyes
And does not need to sleep or dream
To see you behind it’s eyelids
I have not slept when I get up to go
I do not kiss anyone goodbye the way I might have a different pair of lips
I do not listen to the haunting snores
Coming from the wrong side of the bed

Now this restless night
I shut the door quietly behind me
But here is my secret
I wanted to slam the door and run!
Far away from these feelings
Far too large to leave them behind in this place
Or tuck into my jacket
Far, far too large