Sadness held me when no one else would. I was afraid, and alone, and a mess, but sadness selfishly let me crawl into its lap, and curl up into a size of myself that I could tolerate but no one could love. Sadness held me when you didn't. It held me when my heartbeat was a hurricane, and when the apologies rolled out of my throat like tidal waves. Sadness threw on its rainboots and marched through the storm to bring the moon back to me when you couldn't even march outside. Running its cloudy fingers through my hair like strands of spider webs, careful not to skip a single inch, sadness pulled me against its hollow chest and whispered venomous conciliatory reminders of who we are into my broken head. Sadness shook me like a seizure until I finally fell asleep.
And when I woke up to the soft grey light of this existence, sadness held me because my heart slipped through the greedy fingers of everyone who tried, shattering on the floor as you walked away from the mess you hadn't seen before. Sadness held me because no one else could. And I deserved to be held.

I knew how to be silent. How to hold my tongue and close my eyes, and just wait until it was over. I learned how to be as silent as midnight until their words sunk into my ocean of self-doubt and drove ripples towards the surface I had learned how to keep as clean as morning

I learned how to feel like the smallest piece of life left on this earth, invisible from the skies that only I couldn't reach. I learned to curl up, contain myself, and remain as small as life would make me.  I learned to be everything small: small words, small dreams, small person.

I learned to hate. Hate everyone. Hate everything. Hate myself.

And then he said I was beautiful and I told him that couldn't be.
Because I never learned how to be.

The shiny white bottom of this bathtub - this is my defeat
And the way the water drowns out the final things I'm muttering to only myself
The way water droplets hit the wall like bullets as I try to shake these razorblades out of my head
How they all just fall and shatter so inconsequentially
And the stickiness of my ******, impenetrable sanity
Creeping towards the drain like liquid eloquence
Writing out the end of my story because I'm all out of chapters

The end.

Three cigarette butts at the end of the table, three more days and I hope you never come back
We're June in winter, and if that's true, you're Springtime too early
Came up too fast, pushed through the ground
And winter never left
Now all the flowers are dead and you can't bring them back

*******.

******* and your lazy Earl Grey voice
That never said a single true thing to me at all
And your bedroom window that filters light like you filter your thoughts
Keeping all the kind things in

I'm gasoline underfoot
Don't tread me onto your carpets
One drop of a match and I'll set the establishment on fire until they're burning in the capitol building

I'm burning in all capitals.
H E L P M E G O D D A M N I T I A M D Y I N G.

No one really reads these days

I’m writing because it’s midnight, and that’s what happens. My fingers start itching and words start running around in my neural pathways. I’m writing because I’m not really sure I have anything to say.

That’s not true though. I’m writing because there’s always something to say. There’s always something worth hearing, something worth breathing in after it rains. There are metaphors I’ve already overused, so why not use them one more time. There are metaphors unexplored at the bottom of these literary chasms I chase my mind down into and somebody’s got to find them.

I’m writing because I have nothing else to do. Because it’s midnight and the world always starts falling asleep right when my sense of security starts waking up.

I wish you could see me like this in the daytime: unafraid, that is. Unafraid of what sort of patterns my fingers will stroke out on this invalidated copy of Microsoft Word that keeps asking me to validate it. We all want to be validated. You’ll have to get in line.

I’m writing because there are words like efflorescence that roll off my tongue like new pennies dropping into wishing wells.

I guess I’m writing because I’m sad.

We’re all a little sad though, some of us just see it when we look in the mirror. We see it under our eyes and in the empty space around us. We can see it where others can’t. In the empty space inside us.

I’m writing because there’s an ephemeral “her” to be written about, and she’s not even me. She’s this sad girl who curls up in bed at night and wonders what it feels like to be loved by another human being and wonders if it will ever happen to her. She’s one of these girls you pass up and walk past without noticing. I’m writing because my whole existence notices her.

I guess I’m just writing because well… it’s what I do. It’s what I do when I’m empty, it’s what I do when I’m full, it’s what I’ve always done. It’s what I do when there’s nowhere to run to and no one to run from. There’s nothing chasing me; it’s just me in this dark room.

I’m writing because the sound of keys is nice. It’s really nice. It’s the sound of pancakes on the griddle on Sunday mornings when I was young and of heavy breathes against the curve of my neck when I wasn’t so young anymore.

I’m writing because one day I’ll be older and my sadness will be out of touch. It will be a thing of my youth when I was self-indulgent and my universe was still small enough to only spin around me. Because one day you wake up and realize all the pettiness is still there but you don’t matter to yourself anymore.

I’m writing because I do matter. I do matter.
I’m writing because I can.

I guess what you should know about me is that I love like most people drink. Recklessly. Purposefully. And I’ll pour my love into anything that can hold it until there’s no one left to hold it anymore. No one has held me in a long time.

You should know that I’m a wreck after 10pm. Because the rest of the world goes out, and I never really knew why, but now I do. Because people let the sun drag their hopes down with it and then light themselves on fire from the inside. My inside can’t be light anymore. I’m not sure it’s even worth trying. So I sit alone in dark rooms and drown in negative space. Undeveloped, and overexposed. I’m always underwater. I guess what’s why you should know I feel like I’m drowning all the time.

But you should know that I’ll love you endlessly. And that’s not a word that I use lightly. Because words are all I have lately, and even they’re running away from me too. But if you never ran away from me I’d never let love run away from you. And I would chase the sun down into the trenches and drag it back up for you, dripping in pearls and shipwrecked hope that I’d do anything to give you back.

You should know that I mean the things I say. Not all of them, but I mean this. I’ll love you until my soul breaks onto the shore, and even then it will wash up at your feet. Matter can’t disappear just like that, and you have no idea how much you matter to me.

You should know that I’m up to my ankles in tidal pools of apathy, and the only thing growing around me is you. I stopped growing quite some time ago, but I blossom when you’re around. My love grows like an algae bloom. Nice until it kills everything in its path. Sorry.

But I just want you to know that I would love you. Not effortlessly, not painlessly, but eternally. And at 4am when exhaustion finally finds me, you’ll be the last thing sailing across my mind. Because you’re the wind that moves me forward and my broken, uncontrollable self.

And when these words wash up where you are, bottled up inside of me, sink them in the ocean with whatever remains of the rest of me after I shatter it. And just know that I would have loved you.

Just thought you ought to know.

I’m lying in bed tearing my cuticles  off and rubbing my calves together
And personhood is oozing out from the cracks in these walls

I’m exhaling complacency.

I wonder who you’re thinking about when you fall asleep
And what’s dripping from the ceiling
In a room I’ve probably been in

Summer threw itself from thunderclouds
And the person I picked up out of the rainwater
Isn’t me anymore, just droplets of something vacuous

Which is exactly how you feel now
Constantly expanding and pushing me into the negative space around you
All of this is negative
All of me is empty
All this feels like is space

Infinite miles of outer space into forever

“Forever”

Like I said.
Vacuous.

I built myself a house with a door that never unlocked
And a welcome matt that said come in
I guess you could say I'm a tease at heart
If you could ever reach my heart that is

There were no blinds on the windows, but there was no way past the bars
You could look in from in between their iron teeth
You just couldn't get past their reach

I laid out teacups in a perfect line, and hung pictures of us on the wall
You could see throw pillows on the couch
And you could see my bedroom door

I built myself a door without a doorknob
And a room without a light

So when you sat on the sidewalk and said you loved the living room
And you love what I've done with the place
I could fall asleep in the darkness of a heart you couldn't touch
Where there's nothing beautiful to see

I'm stuck inside this love affair
This bed from which people come and go
Writhing, caressing, kissing the cheeks
Of boys who warm my sheets and my heart
Until I let them go

This bed which I have made
And laid in
For longer than I can remember
With the lingering smell of adolescence
And the static cling of selves I sacrificed

I stay here as I pass them along
Over my body and onto the world outside
Infidelity to the person I should have been
Who I have trapped inside my death bed
Adorned with the flowers of lovers
And l have let her slowly die

We curled up in the cheap glow of cheaper Christmas lights and swallowed romance down like English breakfast tea (your favorite), taking in gulps of candy colored warmth
That's how we kept this thing alive, if you're wondering
We wrapped ourselves in winter scarves on winter nights so that we could see the snow swirling, the Earth breathing, and not each other
You looked at the outline of my shoulders while I looked at the sky, and I wondered whether snowflakes jump from a home they don't feel like they belong in anymore
I'm floating through this dark expanse at the mercy of gravity, I'm pale, I'm different, I'm a lot of things
And when the holiday displays are tucked away and you're finally looking at me
Shedding my layers and naked without the blues and greens of tiny plastic lights
I'll hit the pavement and disappear
They'll be looking at the outline of you and you'll be looking at me
As pale and pretty as I ever was in the flurry of my melting winter melancholy
And in the blizzard of the way you can't quite explain to people what was beautiful about me
You'll think back to Christmas lights and tea
And you'll wonder why it couldn't keep me alive

You're naked in my bed and I'm moving through my own veins
Feeling things that you're unaware my body has forgotten how to feel
Things that tucked themselves in the corners of my childhood bedroom
And hid behind a wall of blue-eyed insecure snapshots, hung by string
And laced so tightly it's been suffocating the air of out my heart

I'm so sorry that my whole life seizes when your hands are on me
And that my heart breaks when they're on someone else
Because we have made a mess out of the stickiness of my love
And you have made a mess out of me
Now scattered across these ivory sheets like little grains of sand that scratch my skin at night
Like legs sprawled across yours, and mouths that don't deserve the taste of each other

Your fingers are tracing out words, I can feel it
But I just can't feel what they are
If they're promises, apologies, endearments
Or option
D) All of the above

So I'll just let you watch me and imagine your teeth on my collarbones
While my innocence takes the trust fall into the openness of your sad eyes
And part of me will pity you because you're naked on my bed and I'm miles away
Searching for my naivety in between words I can't make out
Sitting on the tip of your tongue and holding me
Because you're naked
And I think I love you

Your fingers found their way across my spine like raindrops on windshields
Without regret and without belonging there. They only stayed for a little while.

But you're still lingering in the living room
Where you drummed your fingers on his table because something I said was funny
He sets his coffee on that table every morning
It's the table that I've set his coffee on each morning for longer than I remember
He doesn't think I'm funny

My body doesn't remember what it feels like to be anything but his
And I hope it felt like being yours
Being beautiful, being touched, being held
Held is an action, it's a feeling when it's you
I feel held

And are you as tangled up in my feelings as I am?
Because they're sticking to me with static resiliency
They don't want to go
I don't want you to go

And now your teeth are on the tops of my ears
Nipping at my secrets
Because you can't kiss my scars

And your love has found its way into my life like rainclouds on summer skies
With purpose and with hesitancy. Where it will only stay for a little while

I took a needle
Bright and clean
And threaded it through my ventricles

Tied a knot tight
Atop my atria
And hung my heart from my wrist

It felt warm in my palm
And slippery,
Afraid of being held too long

It swung from my wrist
Like a shackle
Like an invitation
Until I hid it in my sleeves in winter time

I hung my heart at my side;
I’d never lose it
And lose it I never did

But in the wind
And when I tossed at night
Slowly it rusted. And cracked

I turned my wrist over once
Just to show you
You pulled my heart from my wrist

And in your hands
It shattered
And the line drew taught

And there I hung.

From the strands of my heart
That you held in your hands
I dangled, still in your grasp

And I hung at your side
Like a prison ball
Like a prize

Lose me,
You never will

You keep me in the breast pocket of a heavy winter coat
Tucked away with crumbled receipts
For shaving gel, condoms, and sleeping medication
Hidden close to your heart

You keep me in the pocket of the jeans you keep discarded on the floor
Under collared shirts and a sweatshirt you got from a club you never joined
Damp with the scent of my sweat and poorly made Chinese food
Because playing with you is like playing house, playing me in the kitchen, you in the office
Us in linen sheets

We're harmless
We're impossible (That's what you told me)
We're just a house that's not real, really
And an imagination that I've let run away from me

We're locked away in a box I keep on my desk
On the torn out corner of a note you passed to me from the pocket of your winter coat
We're crammed between ticket stubs and a cherry stem your tongue laced into a knot
In your sloppy cursive, coated with time in my sloppy optimism:
"I love you"

You looked at me with the world on the edge of your tongue and didn't say a word to me
But I guess that's just how things are between us
How they've always been

We traverse the silence between the people around us
In the crawl space that nobody notices hiding behind
The sound of their own voice
That's where you pulled me into you and breathed in my scent

That's where I breathed in you
Olives, oranges, and sadness
You'd break the glass of any bottle they kept you in

I promise I'll never keep you

It’s dark in central Georgia
And city lights kiss me like you do
Sad and solemnly buzzing
Nothing else will break me like you will

With the hands you stretched out towards me
You’re the dusk I’m dreaming of
Treading gently until we reach the world’s end

Everything will be dark

Little dandelions poked their heads out of the graveyard in my chest
And proclaimed to the permafrost and broken branches
That they weren't afraid of death

So my ribcage shook, the structure burst, the foundation crumbled in
And the dandelions laid flat, made foolish
Never to be seen again

Could you love me with city lights in my hair
Threatening to go over the edge of our high rise affair
Toes on the railing, sights on something better
Somewhere beyond this eternally empty city

Could you love me with a skyline out in front of you
That's doused in purple and orange, and won't have to sneak out in the morning
To go to a meeting to schedule the meetings that are important
So that I can be prepared to die

Will you love me when I'm just lights in the night sky
Something you'll lose sight of a second time
In the burn of a city that makes you feel
Like you're floating while I'm sinking

Will you ever remember if you loved me
On the streets of a city that can't remember
If I was ever here at all

I’ll be the tip toes out of your door at night
The last headlights to ever kiss your driveway goodbye
Since I couldn’t do the same to you

You can be the break in my heart
I can be the good in your night
And I’ll never find out if you’re a breakfast person

I’ll be clothes littered on the floor
Dirtying up our consciences
Until someone comes and picks you up
Out of these messes I make

And you…
You’ll be the hollowness I feel at night

Because I let you fill the holes in my body
When I couldn’t fill the holes in my heart

But I’ll leave a space for you between my fingers
And clear a room in the basement of my thoughts
Where you can stay always

If you ever want

My spine is kissing the ground
And I’m looking up at planets dying out

I wonder if my death will ever be that bright

There’s a constellation of bruises on my shoulders
In the pattern of raindrops
And everything is dusty and damp

It hasn’t been bright inside of me in longer than I can remember

And I don’t remember what you feel like
I don’t remember feeling at all
Or what skin feels like when it’s not puckered into white lines

I’m as dark as ashes

Maybe that’s all I am today.

You puffed out hatred
In blushing clouds that glowed against the hollow sky
And I writhed in the back seat
To the music of a broken carburetor and a lack of self-respect

Inky purple stains strewn across the dashboard
To match the ones on my shoulders
There’s a sky up there and I don’t think you’ve ever seen it
Because you say I’m a constellation that someone wrote the story of
Before they tossed me into the sky

So you toss me around like candy wrappers and train tickets
Because you like me when I’m crumpled in the center console
Below the strength of your hand that holds the cigarette
That you burnt your name into my skin with

This highway smells like gasoline
Maybe because I’m doused in you
And every time the road turns itself over into a new year
I tell myself that I’ll love you

Better than I do from below your feet
Peeking out from under your tread
While I’m treading water in the bottom of your cup holders
Or maybe one day from the passenger seat with your fingers pushing bruises into my thighs

You’re driving me towards the milky way with ashes in my palms
Away from city lights, away from myself
There’s a solar system next to my body in the trunk
And it always spins around you

You were fingers drumming on the steering wheel, eyes always on the road ahead, inhaling the blend of my anxiety and your charm, exhaling gusts of songs I didn’t know I liked and ease that doesn’t belong to either of us. You were major chord progressions and eight o’clock lighting that you can’t hold under your thumb any better than the youth that you tuck into your back pocket as a precaution, only there for show, never for use.

You were self-deprecating humor that’s not real anymore by the time it’s fallen into your palms and a dose of sincerity pushed under your tongue like a vitamin you hope you never taste before washing it down. And you wash it down with everything and anything that makes you feel warm. You were the bits of everyone who’s ever made you feel warm so I sat like a radiator in your passenger seat hoping to radiate right into your core.

You were kindness on the dashboard and fears in the trunk, bumping up against the shell of your light blue disposition at speed bumps and leaned up against the walls of your mind on the straight aways. Audible under the sound of your laughter. Only audible if you were listening (I was listening) while you hummed along to words you don’t mean enough to say out loud.  But your affections sit like pennies behind the windshield, clinking together in sync with the sound of conversations you can’t help but have. You can’t help yourself at all. It’s always warm behind a wall of glass.

You were nights right before they became mornings because if time slips away then you never have to catch it. Time got caught in the space beneath your ribs until you diluted it with a love for everything bigger than you and filled yourself until you could be something bigger than Thursday nights and dog eared pages to books that no one recommended. And in the middle of a sunrise, something you could always say goodnight to, you were arms wrapped around someone smaller than you, holding onto something bigger than any of us, tapping out syllogisms like Morse code and like fingers on steering wheels.

I’m lying at the bottom of the universe staring upwards.
I guess I find myself here a lot.
With the sand making love to my hair and the stars running away from my fingertips so that I can never touch them, I wonder if this is over. I can’t feel the Earth’s heartbeat anymore and no one can feel me. I’m wind blowing across the speed bumps of my own body. If I scream in the middle of this forest will anyone ever heart it?
Can anyone hear me at all?
I’m drowning in plain sight just at the sight of all these things I can’t hold onto. You’re slipping away from me light years at a time.
Summer’s leaving and I’m still trying to sterilize this endless expanse of bleach white that coats my body. I think it used to be my skin but it’s your skin now and I can’t slip out of it. I’m slipping into something from which I do hope I never escape.
I’m underwater. Just down here looking up.

If I could be anything I would be the imprint your bodyweight leaves in your mattress when you pick yourself up (again). I would like to be the curve of your back when you're tired and it's late, but there's still work to do, and the way your shoulders start to cave under your sense of obligation. I want to be the way your heart breaks when your father calls, and the knowledge that he will never love you like I do. I want to be the cracks in the tiles where the ground split open under the weight of the sadness you discard on the bathroom floor every time you step into your shower. I want to be the misery that runs down your drain as you wash away the dusty coating this world has left on your skin. I want to be the place your eyes wander to when you can't look at me: the broken sight of your self-loathing. And when the acid in your stomach has torn through the dwindling reserves of your tangled sense of place, I would be the anchor restraining the winds that rush through your sails. If I could be anything, I would be the way you inhale every time I leave, and the gravity that I'll never understand that brings you back to me.

It was just the tips of your fingers and the way they weren't ashamed to be between mine. The way your skin's not mine, and mine will never be yours, but you loved its freckled smoothness anyways. It's just because my heart broke when every word you passed to me in two a.m. dizziness turned itself into a confession, and the way your eyes gave you away, and apologized for wanting to not be alone tonight.
It's raining today, and I'll never be the weight upon your chest at night, or the pitch you'll tune your self-acceptance to. But I will be the grogginess of morning that never lasts forever, but never fails to come back, and I will love you like the very saddest memory I keep away in my chest. It's not important, but it's where my mind goes when it's windy, so I guess I'll love you there. In the spaces where no one sees it, because no one sees us.
It's just because your smile broke when you said that nothing hurts you. Well, that's certainly not true.
But I will love you like the ocean at midnight, a stillness I'm never allowed to swim in, and can only love from  distance.
But I promise to love you anyways.

I. You said you would always be there for me
II. Then you weren't
III. It's fine though
.... I'm over it

I woke up with second day regret
And the smell of you in my hair
A blend of peonies and repeating my mistakes
Shampoo can't wash it away

And I scrubbed
And I scrubbed
And I scrubbed

And the impressions of your utter
Disregard for me
Stuck to me
Like the glue that binds me into the straight jacket
That your love became when it wasn't love anymore

How am I still shimmering with a dusting of you
How am I still breathing?

Out, and in, and out of my mind
Again and again
While you dance circles around me
And against my hips

Your hands move my life like a hurricane
Maybe they'll name your destruction after me

I'm in the eye of your storm
Beating up against the impenetrable shore
Hoping this summer will bring me rain
To cleanse myself of you

I think I've washed away and all that's left of me is residue
A slippery silver lining
Of what my sadness felt like between your toes
Crunching under your steps

There are 5 steps to recovery
Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in
Don't breathe anymore
All the stepping has stopped

And it's quiet on the ocean
The waves aren't crashing into the stars
The stars aren't bleeding into each other
Not as long as the winds don't move

There's a film on tips of wave tops
Thin and disappearing
All that's left is residue

There are sixteen messages on my answering machine

Human interaction, you know
I try not to do that anymore

Although I'm not trying much of anything lately
I'm not sure there's anything left to try

Everything I'm feeling has already been felt
Everyone I love has already been loved more

I don't know how to love someone anymore
I don't even know how to be someone anymore

People make my sense of self shake
People made my sense of self in the first place

There are splinters of humans in my consciousness
But mostly it's just me in here

And it's actually none of them on my message machine
Just a bunch of telemarketers
Selling me their souls for nineteen ninety nine

I forgot how silky apathy can be
Constricted around my waist
And laced up in the back of my mind

Always there, always far away
Until everyone's out of sight

I woke up one morning with a seed in my heart
And an incurable inability to ever let it grow

I held it in my palms
Cupped and concealed in overgrown cowardice  

And it never broke past the spaces between my fingers
Or through the holes in my heart

I held a seed in my heart
When my heart couldn't hold anything else
Waiting for it to spread it wings

I watered it in the stormy procession
Of four in the mornings and twenty years laters

And I woke up one day just a seed
In the heart of... this?

With a resolute inability to ever grow

So it’s this again.
Sitting at the end of a year, looking over the edge, and there’s still nothing below me
I’m at the bottom of my own “to do" list
I’m on the underside of the world

And I’m alone on the linoleum
Blowing out the flickers of another year
Cupped between my palms
While the wax melts down my ankles and into pools

It’s another 365 degrees of suffering
Because there are different degrees of that, you know
And I’m still sitting here alone
At the beginning of another year

Happy birthday to me.

The sad thing is that sometimes you're still there
In the back of my mind
In the tangle of my sheets
In the afterglow of our love
And no matter how I try to wash you down
With an overdose of one-a-day lovers
Who love me even less than you did
You're taste is still there
Forever written across my tongue
Like the bitter and inevitable
"I miss you"
That I still taste of
Every morning

I stood in the steam and tried to feel human again
Tried to feel anything at all
The hot water beat down on me like angel wings, and the steam rose up like flowers in winter, and I breathed in the clean smell of apples mixed with my own blood
Trying to remember if this is what happiness smells like
I stood there, in the embrace of scalding water, like the aftermath of the world's demolition
Letting summer rains wash away the rubble and the ashes that crowded the empty streets in my mind
And in the steam I felt my heart rip open as the murky warmth seeped into my skin
Behind a glass door, thick with the condensation of the lies and the fake smiles I slipped out of and left lying on the bathroom floor
I let myself die in the steam while the water washed away the granules of sincerity that stuck in my blood-matted hair
And breathing out the moist, heavy density of my own broken personhood
I stood naked in the solitude of my momentary shelter
Hoping to never feel human again

There's a problem stuck under my fingernails
Bleeding into the cracks that the last one left
Because your eyes never seem to hold still
Long enough for me to catch them

But I'm chasing you
And I'm chasing you
And I don't know why I'm still chasing you
Around bent street signs all stamped with disinterest

I guess it's just because I'm still hoping you'll be there tonight
You're a parasite
But whenever the rain comes to wash you away
You only burry deeper in my skin

Everything in front of me is grey. Grey or an off-grey shade of almost grey. I'm an off-grey shade of almost dead.
This isn't a game of horseshoes.

You are or you aren't, and I'm definitively not. I'm not the microcosm of anything bigger than this, and there is nothing bigger than this.

The walls are crawling and I can't, and I swear to god that pain is something I'll never feel again. I just feel bottomless.

Give her your affection and she'd give you the freckle on the inside of her hip
She was that kind of girl.

Green apple ***** with bruises under her shirt
The kind of girl who's smile broke your heart before you even realized your heart was hers

The kind of girl who made you wish you'd learned to paint so you could keep her morning eyes always
Hanging on your walls in distant shades of grey

The kind of girl who made you wish you'd learned to write music instead of learning to paint
Because her laugh was bells and whistles
And the saddest thing you'd ever heard

Give her ten minutes of your time and she'd give you anything you asked for
And you'd never know what to ask for because you'd never imagined you'd have a girl like her

A fear of the dark, torn cuticles, and an inability to stay within the lines of time
One morning you would wake up to an empty closet

You'd realize she was everything and you were a tally on a bedpost
She was that kind of girl

Failure clung to me like winter,  wrapping its tender fingers around my throat
And shaking life from me like dreams from childhood sheets
Failure let icy winds take hold of me and steal away my soul with whispers
Visible for everyone to see, insufficiency etched itself across my skin like bruises
Passionate, vibrant, and lethal.
In the scorn of daylight, my faults glistened like dew drops in the morning
Written across my shoulders like the freckled stories of summer
Or the shattered tales of my childhood
And in the middle of my self-loathing, I stood naked and unhinged
Unraveling all my syllogisms until acidic, gradual failure
Broke me down to the most basic form of human life
And there are I was
Alone and nonexistent
And failure draped itself over my bruised arms and shaking faith
And lovingly, endlessly, blissfully
Failure drowned me in its love

Missing you hit me suddenly
Suddenly six months too late

And it tasted like lemon bars
And prom night
And coffee mixed with sweet tea

Missing you, it felt like holding a ticket
Between the pads of my teenage thumbs
With your last name instead of mine.

Missing you feels like dying
Slowly because there’s something I’m missing
Some way to slip away
Slowly backwards
Back to the sign I must have missed

But I can’t.
All I can do is miss you.

Missing you feels like everything
Because everything feels like you
The warmth of pavement on my back
The singe of a burnt tongue from hot tea

Everything feels like punishment
Everything feels like empty hope

Hope that one day everything will feel like you again
That one day, you won’t be missing.

I was fifteen and as sober as I'll ever be
when a man I'll never know told me more than God ever did
With a broken embrace and hands that fell singed and irrelevant as parchment
He said he couldn't go yet
I told him no one wants to. He told me everyone does.
Because dying is inevitable
It's a lock that can't be picked
But everyone wants to die happy
And he had never been happy

That's what he said to me.

There was a river running through me, carving into my ventricles
Winding, turning, and tossing at night

It rose in the winter and fell into freefall
When the clouds rushed through my veins

Carving, etching, scarring my tissue
There was a river that flowed through me like gasoline

And then a summer without a drop of you.
A lifetime without ever coming clean
And a river left me like you did
Dry and hollowed

Just lay here with me. And let's breathe to the rhythm of each other's longing
That's what I want from you
Silence in the universe for just one minute so I can hear you breathe
So I can hear my molecules pulling back together
Just pull me into you

Let me just be here with you. Let's just... be here
Let's not even know where we are
The side of a forest for which we'll never see the trees
Just the forest, just the universe, just us

Just for one second, just look at me.
Not into me, not past me, just at me.
Just look at me and tell me this is it. We're it.

If words crept up on you
As you lay silent but awake
I wonder what you'd say with them
And if you'd speak of me

Of the way I hold myself when I'm hurt
Arms wrapped around my ribcage
And how you wish your arms could take their place
And with all of your heart that nothing may ever harm me

And by what name would you call me
With my own or as the benefactor of yours
In cursive or in your sloppy print
That's scattered amongst my pockets

Would you love me in conceits and
In ways you'll never speak of me out loud
And if the words gave you their hearts like I did

Maybe you would at least take them

If you break my heart give it back to me
Not that it's worth anything anymore
Not that it was worth something to begin with
Not that it matters

But there's a hollowness under the indent
That your palm pressed into my spine
And it's beating against my skin

Just liked you did

I'll be whatever you want
I'll be silent, I'll be small, I'll be still
But if your words cut into my wrists again
And tear my veins right open

Collect my blood in a honey ***
And keep it on your shelf
So when the addiction sneaks in
And you need one more hit
I won't take your punches

I won't be here anymore

And if your hands can't contain themselves
If my pain is just that ******* **** to you
When your heart is done with mine
Please just give it back

I'll take it in bits and in pieces
I'll take it with a brave face
I'll take whatever you haven't already taken

Please
Just give it back

But if it were not for the china,
I would crash into you
Grateful.  

The ashes in your curtains
And their suicide notes in their mouths
I would splinter in your palms

Were it not for morning
Cold, and sweet.
Let me.

Your hands are on her waist now and my head burns
Oh, these steady, even, licking flames that tickle the linings of my heart
The sky's gone black and blue tonight

And I think it's a little bit sad, isn't it
That the way your fingers kiss her skin sets me off
Like an alarm that was never unset
Even after our funeral came and came again,
And we all put away our condolences on a shelf that only I'm still keeping clean
And empty

When your mouth is on the lines of her neck, the curves of her mouth, on her
My heart implodes
An inky, sticky stain that drips down into my bone marrow like rain, a deep and apathetic life support
A midnight blue promise that streams into the bullet-holes in my shoes
Promise me that this is not what morning looks like

And I hope this is how you feel
Battered.

When I find hands to fall on me too, and I really hope someday that I might,
I hope your blood gets viscous and gets caught under the edges of your skin
Just black little blurs peeking out unabashedly from behind your paper-thin touch

We all fall down, but I collapse quietly
Beaten to a small, smiling carcass that you can put away on a shelf
Discard me until the Spring thrashes against the frozen ground and strangles our winter
I'll be here, despondent

Her skin is warm and clean, I suppose
Yours is not. The ash will find you too
And I'll be here.

Search all you want through the strands of her hair
You'll never find it
And morning may never find me again

Pale blue eyes and to do lists on my arms
I guess I'm not everyone's type

Crossing off miseries like milk and eggs
I'm wrapped in another stranger's sheets (again)
I take it back
I'm everyone's type but yours

Poems on crumpled napkins
Red lipstick and tipsy confessions
I guess I could if I wanted
If it would make you love me

As if anything could make you love me

Just bad music that everyone else grew out of
And cold hands from only being held in cold hearts
Why does loving myself feel like an affair?

Cinnamon tea and Splenda
I'm a certain flavor of je ne sais quoi
Good for winter nights, but not my favorite

Apparently not yours either

I fall in love in the summer
When sheets are thin
And breezes are warm

When our curtains are sheer
And the sun sets over thunderclouds
And our feet caress each other at the end of a trodden dock

I fall in love when nights are short
And time moves sweetly thick, and slow
And our breath tastes hard like liquor

I fall in love off of hot asphalt
And exposed souls

Getting high on parking structures
And men’s fingers in my hair

And
I fall apart in the winter
When we’re sheltered
And evenings come too early

When it’s cold outside
So I burry too deep into myself
And lose lovers like keys

To what,
I’m still not sure

Breathe in, don't forget to breathe out
Even the streetlights are tired tonight
We're wrapped up and naked in your sheets
And I can't untangle my legs from the soft cocoon of your ivory melancholy

Your breaths are cold, and I wonder how that's possible
Maybe it's cold inside your ventricles tonight
Maybe that's why I've been feeling so numb
Maybe not

Neither of us are speaking, only you're breathing
And I wonder where the thud of my heartbeat ran away to
I think you wonder too, but neither of us want to break the silence
So much is already broken

Breathe in, and we're both picking up on subtle notes of apathy and dissonance
It's a floral blend of apologies that neither of us owe each other
Breathe out and this whole room's on fire again

I'm too tired for this, and I'm too fragile for you
The moonlight is all caught up in your hair
There's a world out there dancing across your answering machine

I wonder who thinks of you when I can't anymore
I wonder who thinks of me
Breathe out and this will all be gone

There’s tonic water at our bedside
And crumbs in our sheets
And that word still feels sticky in my mouth

“ours”
Like candy coating
Cherry red and saccharine
Like happiness my body hasn’t matured into

I’m a river’s mouth
Spitting out melancholy
Dripping from my lips

There’s music in the foreground
And your breaths are muted under the sheets

While I stamp this sadness out of me
With the press of your warm mouth
Wet against mine

Letting this inkiness run out of me
Staining the places hidden
Under your skin

I’m writing out nineteen years of
Cigarette smoke
That I didn’t have to inhale
To get trapped in my heart

Across your shoulders at night
Hoping one day
Your hands will wring this out of me

It’s early in the morning
And you’re up spinning ambitions
Into something I hope I witness
The cobwebs of

And I’m naked
On your side of the bed
Watching your shoulders rise and fall

Under the humming
Of our overworked heater
Falling asleep to the promise of
The way you look at me

Let me be yours
For at least one more turn of hours

We both can only love me drunk

The sun is bleeding across the clouds
Throwing streaks of red across my fingertips
I'm a thousand miles above you
Coasting on the tails of winds that I only hope
Will return me safely to you

It's the sort of plastic cups and cocktail peanuts evening
That I wish we could share up here
Because my heart's beating to this sunset I'm finally on top of
While somewhere you're thinking of someone

I hope she's me.
Legs crossed and expectations shuffled
In seat 14A of the first flight I've ever taken by myself
Without taking alone

I know she's me.
Because I still feel you clutching me
Even with my nose pressed to the glass
While I wonder what would happen if I jumped
And if when I fell through this ceiling of clouds
It could feel as good as when I fall for you

I fell for you this morning
Not for the first time and never for the last time
When your voice was dry and your mouth was warm

And I'm up here painting the image of what you've done to my heart
Across the cloud in neon reds

There's a horizon to my left
And a sad story writing its conclusion across the sky behind me

Fading into the glow of embers bleeding out of me
Up here
Staining the sky