Here is where I sit and dig my teeth into my lower lip and extract the splinter of you from my heart, so I can drip red onto the paper and make it into words. Here is where I tell you how much I ached for you and never said anything. Here is where I laugh regretfully over the word ‘crush,’ which in the end fulfils its title so perfectly. Here is where I bleed.

Fact #1:
You didn’t do anything special to make me like you.
There was no zealous epiphany or grand gesture that sent butterflies streaming through my abdomen. You were horribly wonderfully you, and that’s what did it. That is what tipped me over the edge.
I remember the precise instant everything changed. The pendulum swung into unfamiliar territory; I looked at you and a powerful case of vertigo rocked my being. I may have grabbed onto something. A desk. A chair. Anything to keep me standing until my head resettled on my shoulders and the world was normal again. In any case, you were oblivious. I watched you, both sorry and glad that you were, and struggled not to drown.

I don’t blame you. It wasn’t your fault. How could you have sensed the seismic shift I was so careful not to telegraph? How could you have known I’d go and do something so moronic as get a crush on you? I’m sorry, dear. I am. I wish I hadn’t.

Fact #2:
You think no one has ever had feelings for you.

(What an uncomfortable phrase, Had Feelings For You. Sounds like there’s some sort of compartment in my heart labelled with your name, as though if you cut it open and looked inside you’d see ash and glitter suspended like dust motes in light. Impossible, infinite).

You think this because you’re human, and humans tend to see the worst in themselves. You’re—according to you—awkward, bothersome, repressed, weird, unattractive, alone, different, inferior. You worry over the biggest things, the smallest things, and everything between. You crack open with great frequency.

However.
However.

There is someone in this world who loved you, who loves you still (in a deep deep recess of her soul), who wishes she’d been brave enough to tell you; wishes also that she’d been able to hold you and kiss you and run wild with you in every beautiful place.
You are worth someone’s feelings, and there is a heart out there full of ash and glitter in your name, beating away.
Sadly, you’ll never know whose.

Fact #3:
Crushes ******* sting.

(Don’t look, don’t look at their eyes, don’t look at the color in them or the flare, hold your breath, think of anything else, remind yourself that they can’t, they won’t, it’s stupid. Call them friend, just Friend, because that’s what they want. Don’t let them see the way you pine for them, the roaring creature in your chest. Don’t. Don’t.)

Fact #4:
You didn’t return my feelings.

Inevitably, the person we find ourselves pulled to always lets something slip. A mention of a third party with whom they’d like to (and to me it sounds so painful, so ominous) “get to know.” A giggle when a certain girl or boy passes. An admiring look thrown their way.
Worse, the object of our longing declares they like no one at all, and that’s my story. I’m sorry to say I thought, for just a bit, that you did. It’s my fault for misreading the signs. I take full blame. I’m human, too, after all, and I know very little. Who am I to project my fantasy onto you?

It still hurts, though. Aches in a way I don’t wish to remember or relive, ever. Not being liked back takes the form of black, rolling nausea, which I felt when I laid prone on my bedroom floor, eyes numb and full, breathing air all thick with dead things. It’s a sickness, a condition. A person cannot get over it any quicker or easier than they can a tumor. It can recede or overwhelm and usually one has no say in this gamble.
In my case, there is both. The pain fluctuates from day to day, lifts and falls. I see you and we laugh, and, internally, privately, I bleed. But you don’t need to know that. I will not have you see me as some weak or broken thing when what I am is on fire, hot with a glowing sadness. I’m a survivor of nuclear detonation. My heart was once spattered on these walls, this page, but I’ve gathered it up and molded it together again and it doesn’t look at all how it used to, but today it’s (almost) whole.

Fact #5:
A piece of me will always wish you wanted her the way she wanted you.

I think of other universes, split off from ours: a myriad of alternate trajectories. Perhaps in one of them we are together. Perhaps we looked and we knew and we melded. Who knows? What a silly, futile wish.

That is pain and reality. That is life.

There’s something about you that
makes me want to write
        bad poetry
and half-assed short stories.  

Something about you that
makes me want to take all my
unspoken words and turn them
into something beautiful,
something worthwhile.

You make me want to be an artist
like Van Gogh or Sylvia Plath;
you make me want to create.

Maybe it’s that blue wave
that crashes down like
an incoming tide on the beach—
        your eyes
when you look at me in
a certain way, in
a certain light.

Or maybe it’s
the way that you say
my name and then say all
those horrible things that make
me want to rip something
        open.

Those words that rip me open.

You make beautiful stanzas get stuck in my
head like lyrics to a bad pop song;
I can’t erase them and the
only way I can think of to cope with it
is to write them down like a schoolgirl
with a well worn diary.

I think I might as well have hypergraphia.

I am an unprofessional
medical doctor with
a pen, paper, and
Word Document
suffering from a form of
verbal ***** because I
can’t possibly think of a way to
        speak my mind.

I think I would make a very good mute.

I wish I lacked a voice box
because then I wouldn’t have to
be the one that has to
say all the right, comforting things
at the all the right times
and all the right places.

Sometimes it feels as if I’m
being eaten from the inside out
by some sort of paratrophic organism
that sits atop my frontal lobe and
dictates my life and fluctuates my
anxiety and I can’t even think about
some things anymore because of this
nervous clench I get in my gut when
I let my thoughts get too jumbled.

But you—you make me want to write
the most heartfelt and sappy sentences
and you make me want to
be more than just ordinary.

You make me want to be extraordinary.  

I guess that what I’m writing is
an apology in the shape of
a few stanzas and a few metaphors.

And this is an “I forgive you” for that night
that we spent outside your house
arguing over the stupidest of things,
so stupid that I can hardly
remember a single word I said to you.

Nothing gratifying is ever
painless to obtain
and I want to be a fighter like
Hercules or Alexander the Great.

I want to be extraordinary with you.

These are the gardens of the Desert, these
The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,
For which the speech of England has no name--
The Prairies. I behold them for the first,
And my heart swells, while the dilated sight
Takes in the encircling vastness. Lo! they stretch
In airy undulations, far away,
As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell,
Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed,
And motionless for ever.--Motionless?--
No--they are all unchained again. The clouds
Sweep over with their shadows, and, beneath,
The surface rolls and fluctuates to the eye;
Dark hollows seem to glide along and chase
The sunny ridges. Breezes of the South!
Who toss the golden and the flame-like flowers,
And pass the prairie-hawk that, poised on high,
***** his broad wings, yet moves not--ye have played
Among the palms of Mexico and vines
Of Texas, and have crisped the limpid brooks
That from the fountains of Sonora glide
Into the calm Pacific--have ye fanned
A nobler or a lovelier scene than this?
Man hath no part in all this glorious work:
The hand that built the firmament hath heaved
And smoothed these verdant swells, and sown their slopes
With herbage, planted them with island groves,
And hedged them round with forests. Fitting floor
For this magnificent temple of the sky--
With flowers whose glory and whose multitude
Rival the constellations! The great heavens
Seem to stoop down upon the scene in love,--
A nearer vault, and of a tenderer blue,
Than that which bends above the eastern hills.

  As o'er the verdant waste I guide my steed,
Among the high rank grass that sweeps his sides
The hollow beating of his footstep seems
A sacrilegious sound. I think of those
Upon whose rest he tramples. Are they here--
The dead of other days?--and did the dust
Of these fair solitudes once stir with life
And burn with passion? Let the mighty mounds
That overlook the rivers, or that rise
In the dim forest crowded with old oaks,
Answer. A race, that long has passed away,
Built them;--a disciplined and populous race
Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek
Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms
Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock
The glittering Parthenon. These ample fields
Nourished their harvests, here their herds were fed,
When haply by their stalls the bison lowed,
And bowed his maned shoulder to the yoke.
All day this desert murmured with their toils,
Till twilight blushed, and lovers walked, and wooed
In a forgotten language, and old tunes,
From instruments of unremembered form,
Gave the soft winds a voice. The red man came--
The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce,
And the mound-builders vanished from the earth.
The solitude of centuries untold
Has settled where they dwelt. The prairie-wolf
Hunts in their meadows, and his fresh-dug den
Yawns by my path. The gopher mines the ground
Where stood their swarming cities. All is gone--
All--save the piles of earth that hold their bones--
The platforms where they worshipped unknown gods--
The barriers which they builded from the soil
To keep the foe at bay--till o'er the walls
The wild beleaguerers broke, and, one by one,
The strongholds of the plain were forced, and heaped
With corpses. The brown vultures of the wood
Flocked to those vast uncovered sepulchres,
And sat, unscared and silent, at their feast.
Haply some solitary fugitive,
Lurking in marsh and forest, till the sense
Of desolation and of fear became
Bitterer than death, yielded himself to die.
Man's better nature triumphed then. Kind words
Welcomed and soothed him; the rude conquerors
Seated the captive with their chiefs; he chose
A bride among their maidens, and at length
Seemed to forget,--yet ne'er forgot,--the wife
Of his first love, and her sweet little ones,
Butchered, amid their shrieks, with all his race.

  Thus change the forms of being. Thus arise
Races of living things, glorious in strength,
And perish, as the quickening breath of God
Fills them, or is withdrawn. The red man, too,
Has left the blooming wilds he ranged so long,
And, nearer to the Rocky Mountains, sought
A wilder hunting-ground. The ****** builds
No longer by these streams, but far away,
On waters whose blue surface ne'er gave back
The white man's face--among Missouri's springs,
And pools whose issues swell the Oregan,
He rears his little Venice. In these plains
The bison feeds no more. Twice twenty leagues
Beyond remotest smoke of hunter's camp,
Roams the majestic brute, in herds that shake
The earth with thundering steps--yet here I meet
His ancient footprints stamped beside the pool.

  Still this great solitude is quick with life.
Myriads of insects, gaudy as the flowers
They flutter over, gentle quadrupeds,
And birds, that scarce have learned the fear of man,
Are here, and sliding reptiles of the ground,
Startlingly beautiful. The graceful deer
Bounds to the wood at my approach. The bee,
A more adventurous colonist than man,
With whom he came across the eastern deep,
Fills the savannas with his murmurings,
And hides his sweets, as in the golden age,
Within the hollow oak. I listen long
To his domestic hum, and think I hear
The sound of that advancing multitude
Which soon shall fill these deserts. From the ground
Comes up the laugh of children, the soft voice
Of maidens, and the sweet and solemn hymn
Of Sabbath worshippers. The low of herds
Blends with the rustling of the heavy grain
Over the dark-brown furrows. All at once
A fresher wind sweeps by, and breaks my dream,
And I am in the wilderness alone.

Today is Tuesday, November 19th, 2013. And I want to talk about you. I want to talk about the clenching and fizzing in my stomach right now as I imagine wrapping you up in my arms and having you close again. I want to talk about the ache in my chest when I think about how it's been ninety days since I last kissed you, since the day I saw you cry as I let you slowly drop from my arms, then hands, then fingertips, and drove away, looking out the window to see you let your head fall into your hands. It's been ninety days since I sat on the floor of the airport and felt my entire being rebelling against getting on that plane and recrossing the thousands of miles that separate us. I want to talk about how I tuck those thoughts away and instead smile as I think of giving you piggyback rides through the park, and kissing in front of churches, and diving into cold pools, and touching you softly as we lay unclothed in your bed, and laughing so hard at your jokes that I'm sure I'm making a fool of myself.

I want to talk about you. I want to talk about you and me. I want to talk about you with me. I want to talk about how you say things that stop me in my tracks and make me reevaluate the truth. I know you, but I can never quite predict your opinions or reactions. You surprise me in this really heart stopping, sometimes refreshing, sometimes eerie way.

I want to talk about how beautiful you are, god, let me please talk about this. Your mind is an intricate, thrumming place that I love to get inside and peek in its dusty corners. I'll try not to leave fingerprints, but I hope you'll forgive me if I do. I think I'm the first person to see some of these places, and I respect them with a reverence. And your heart, your heart... it's an open space that fluctuates and adjusts around me. I know it's learning how to make me fit, but considering that, I'm very comfortable here. It's not a maze, not a grand palace, but not run down either. It's warm in here, slightly musty in the back rooms but in a nice way, while the front is breezy. It's cryptic at first, it's easy to question where one is when first entering. But it has an essence so very you that it's impossible to lose your way completely. I've wandered enough to memorize some of the walls and walk around with a timid freedom. I don't think I would ever dare stride through with arrogance, but I hope to gain confidence the more I explore. Your outside is just as breathtaking. Sometimes I look at the pictures of us together and I stare at your face like it's a puzzle I can solve, because you are indeed the prettiest girl I have ever seen and it astonishes me that yes - you are real. You have this smile that I try to coax out as much as possible, and eyes that are pleasant and warm. Have I told you how much I've always loved brown eyes? It's a colour that suits your irises, that suits you. The image I get when I imagine looking into your eyes is that of wrapped up in soft blankets in a field at dusk. You have beautiful hair that you love to complain about, but I am forever adoring of how it sticks every which way and makes you look - yeah, I'm going to say it - pretty **** cool. Your body is fit and perfect and I'll tell you again, I am so, so jealous. Shadows reach around you to try and feel your shape, rain trickles across your smooth skin to try and kiss as much as it can reach. And when your body tangles with mine, it's magic. You are warm and soft and my fingertips can't help but want to trace a map over you, pressing into their favorite places and trailing across your frame as lightly as a sigh. Your voice, if I had to pick, is the thing that best represents you. Its most frequent setting is this strong, hardy tone that gets your point across with as much bluntness as the words you choose. When you're sleepy it becomes soft and drawling and muffled. When you have to act professional, it heightens and becomes cheery and sweet. When you're touched, it turns lovely and breathy and exquisitely feminine. You are embodied by these sides of you, and there's more I'm yet to hear and learn from it. All of it is beautiful in a way so uniquely you that I smile just in Knowing.

I want to talk about knowing you. I've always wanted just to know you, from the day we met. That was the prevailing thought: How to Know You. Now every day I am given glimpses into you, and every day I'll know a little more, and I couldn't be happier.

I want to talk about you. I want to talk about how much I love you. I love you the way lights love to pool on the sidewalk. I love you the way ink loves the abstract. I love you the way sand loves seashells. I love you the way trees love sunlight. I love you the way airplanes love the sky. I love you with a ferocity and a tenderness and an affection it halts the motion of the world for moments at a time. You bring words and metaphors to mind in a way no inspiration could, and the next second you stop all thought dead and leave my head buzzing pleasantly empty. I used to refuse to write of love; now my hands know of little else. You've changed me, profoundly, intensely. What did I spend my thoughts on before? Now, I just want to talk about you.

I.  Father
A folded spiral delicately assembled, nestled in modernity feigning a place in nature. Round and round her made and found ingredients turn, creating a circle whose beginning and ending sit so close that they almost touch. Her circle extends far beyond the nest she is building, extends without shifting into her mother’s laden cycle. Bird, earth, man; at the extremities of their existences they are separated no longer. The old man’s limbs sit heavy, their frailty relieving them of the weight of gravity that had, in their youth, banished the wind. Quietly he sways, lost in the rhythm of terrestrial orbit that seems to beat louder with each passing day. I see the thoughts move about his stoic face, like midwinter ice-skaters whose tracks become his wrinkles and whose unraveled scarves are caught in the same current that graces his cheeks like a kiss. I think he must have found the answer for which I am still seeking the question. I think he must know that the feathered ***** of native energy that speed like backyard bottle rockets through the air and pull worms like loose threads from the fabric of our mother’s coat will see morning’s glory blossom, and drink of its sweet nectar, and that he will become those flowers and breathe their roots up from  humid soil. I do not know where he goes when his eyes close like the wooden shutters that will soon be taken from the old brick house’s covered windows to close over a more somber cradle. I know when I mimic his tacit gesture I am in the singing robin’s nest at which he so tranquilly gazes, crying to the universe from the raw cords in my fragile neck for nourishment, for some magical substance, some divinely instructive stardust that would explain to me why the leaves shake just so and why, when our brilliant star hides his smoldering stare behind curved lids, I follow suit. I am new and unrefined and awake, and I can count the days of my existence like my still-wet and vital feathers that are too young yet to catch the wind. In this place God is a burgeoning emotion in my chest that speaks to the earth’s fertility, an abundance fed by the bodies of her fallen children. I am all of this and I know that in truth the old man thinks of nothing but the glowing atmosphere that fluctuates in both temperature and hostility, but is, at this moment, swaddling his broken form like the arms of a mother he will soon reclaim. The still branches of night are so laden with stars that they threaten to snap and come crashing down on the planet that sees them only as the ripened fruit of cosmic energy. Out of the night the emancipating wings of my consciousness flourish and are carried on stronger tides to see human expiration as the agent of enduring rebirth. Flight of body and soul bridge the gap between what was and what will be, closing the circle and guiding my solemn realization to fruition. The old man sleeps amidst a shower of home and sweet ****** bird-song. The wind that fails to wake his aged form smells like beginnings.



II. Son
The man is an ocean. He is reaching out to distant shores, spreading himself so thin at the edges that people can’t see where he ends and his country begins. The boy is a buoy, caught in a tide that never stops to wonder about the things it is moving. Buoys trust the ocean because they have to, they never had a choice. The two stand soul in soul at the crossways station of anticipation. The boy is silent. “He must know the way”, he thinks. “We’ve fought this war before. It was in a dream I had. I wrapped your arms around me like a cape and gravity couldn’t tell us what to do anymore. It was raining, I thought. Now I think those might just have been your tears coming back down on me. When gravity returned that was the first thing it took. It was so easy to cry when we could pretend the distance was only physical.” In this hub of passing voices and trans-Atlantic potential fear is a wide-eyed monster pretending to be a saint, wishing to be a child.   boy leaves Siddhartha’s white and glowing temple. The temple is surrounded with iron birds like transformers let loose from the pages of his comic book, rolled and folded like a hammer in his fist. His mind is an iron kettle whistling in the dark. His changing voice walks miles with words like his father’s back pocket bullets, shouting “I loved something once. Its name was a feeling. Its hands were the way the wind feels when you’re far from home. Its loneliness was a stone tower that I’m still trying to climb.” He sings an ode to a modern ocean, oily verses of pollution and corruption sinking morals like ships to be consumed and reborn to a better earth. He calls it a lullaby. I did not hear the last note played. His father forgot to sing it before his heels turned towards the old continent.

III. Spirit
Broken colors, reassembling, slow as the breeze that wanders and mocks the stationary world. I’m caught in a metamorphosis of mind, dancing a waltz of confession towards reality. Faces have faded, have bloomed from myth to speak in mortal voices, though their tongues be made of steel. Clouds of dust, caught in stray rays of northern sun, hang low over the aquatic murk, the impenetrable field of elemental strangers, and through them appear two figures. The first, his shoulders a bit too hunched and his gait a bit to staggered to be of this last generation, traces the perimeter of the pond with a studied poise; the latter figure comes into focus as he approaches the shore. I hear him calling, asking. I know he is asking even if the language he speaks is a foreign one. He pulls from under the surface a log, bent and creased like the aged arm that reaches out to assist. I am a ghost. I observe but rest immobile as if I am alive only in essence, existing for a moment in the corpse of the past. A fly on the wall whose chiseled stones tower over this piece of eternity. There is so much of forever piled within these walls, and in a desperate search for meaning I am left to drift away on waves that crash miles above this fortress of sand and early-summer expectance. The two continue, the boy taking two steps for every one of his grandfather’s. The possibility is never brought forth that they will reach me; I am not a part of the scene unfolding, I do not hold a piece in this game. Still… the wind coaxes the breath out of my silent lips, left powerless by the immensity of the incommunicable. I’ve forgotten the boy, forgotten his red jacket and his boots that slap the mud and his legs that propel his body up and down just to hear the sound the earth makes when he lands. He is beside me. I know this like I know the location of my own two feet, currently sunk into the shaded conglomeration of dirt and fallen leaves that makes up the bottom of the inky pond. I turn and for a moment wonder if he can see me, for I am but a ghost in most modern senses of the term. But he doesn’t know that- he has yet to see death or destitution. He knows nothing of ghosts, and therefore sees me clear as the blue eyes through which he looks in wonder. Those eyes! How could I forget their inquisitive stare, whose innocent gaze stole from my image all that it could not accept, all of the melancholy reflection and grief of which it knew not. Long and long he stayed unblinking, tugging on loose threads of my being, ever unaware of their significance. Somewhere by the path-side, under trees that bow and sway his grandfather calls- his voice is heavy with a familiar tone that I am unable to identify, like the call of a bird whose name you remember only when you are asked to recall it. Old and young part, hands intertwined in their forever-dance of humanity, playing games with age and expiration, laughing at the distance as if it were only there to make the known road less hospitable. The world is still. I am a spirit, no longer a ghost, rid of darkness, at least for the time it takes to refill my lungs with the gold-spun fabric of the universe, all bluebells and stardust at this moment and forever, and exhale away.

Passions I have a few
Questions I have many
Perceptions are in a constant flux

Emotions go on with out control
The heart space fluctuates
Physical motions do not reflect the interior

Goals I have no use for
Intentions change with the wind

All things I hold
All I that I have brought
Have fallen to the wayside

Persecution does nothing for me
No matter how I perceive my concept of growth
Someone finds a logical objection

**** your logic
I will not be swayed
Leave me to my

To this misconception

The soft blue-green of the moon’s light floods into my bedroom.
The day: over
Time ebbs away, nonexistent
The memories on the shelf fall off
The shattered glass grabs onto the moonlight and hugs it
The light dissipates
It leaves an empty shell, the remainder of light curling and taking off
to cover a faraway land with a soft reassurance of mist

The drowsiness underneath my eyes dwindles away
This is the noise that keeps me awake.
Exhilaration is pumped into my hollow bones
Painful buzzing cuts into my brain at random. The light of the moon fluctuates
The bitter food still alive on my tongue overwhelms my senses
The sharpness of the light penetrates my eye with force. I can’t see anything
The light bends, white and bright, the stars burrow into my iris
My bones are jelly, my brain is a cocoon of abhorrence, my heart is a balloon
It pops.

The beast within me ***** away at the jelly, fed.  
The creature in my brain breaks out and flies away to infest another innocent.
The noise slips away. I’m a paper girl limp on the bed.
Unable to move or feel or think or to have a heartbeat.
Quiet blossoms inside. I exist as a metaphor. I ***** my eyelids shut.
i hope they won’t fall off
The stars wink away. An infinite, dark sky looms overhead.
The darkness is a blanket, firm and reliable, warm. I drape it over myself and vanish.
Entropy lives within me. I nurture it, because it is my friend.
It flies away into its nest of clouds. It is distant. It will not come again for awhile.

Shadows shift onto the floor and murmur.
Dreams await.

© 2018
Xandra Lynch

I'm clingy, but I'll never admit it. I'll check my phone every 5 minutes to see if you've replied to something I've drafted numerous times in my head. I'll get anxious when you don't answer me back for a long time, and I'll think to myself maybe you've had enough of me. Yet when your message finally comes, it doesn't matter what you've said because the simple act of replying assures me that you're still mine. At least, for the time being it will. I'll get jealous a lot, but please don't misconstrue it as me tying you down. I won't get jealous because I want you all to myself, no. I want you to be able to spend time with your family, friends, and everyone else in between. I'll get jealous because maybe, just maybe, you'll find something special in someone else, as you did with me. I'll be weary that maybe you'll look at someone just as how you look at me, or your heart will begin to wander somewhere else.
I'm insecure, and it's of no fault of your own. When I say something negative about myself, it's not a cry for attention nor is it me wanting you to disagree with me. Before you, I'll probably never imagine in a million years that you'd be mine. So by virtue of the fact that we're together makes me even more insecure. But let me make something clear; I won't be bagging on myself all the time. I know what I excel in, what talents I possess, the aspects in my physique that work in my favor, and so on. I'm just more vocal about the things which fall in the opposite categories. I'll possess many faults, and I'm not looking for you to fix them. I think when I finally meet you, I'll be more accepting of these faults than I am now. All I'm asking is that you accept them with me.
I know this letter seems to be focusing on the negative things about me, and it's quite a bit to take in... so let me make a change of pace.
I'll always love you. When we're finally acquainted, and we finally begin to personify the definition of love for one another, I'll never need another definition. I've told myself countless times that I would never cheat on someone because I know what that feels like. I'll love you more than I love myself and I know that isn't too great but that's just how I am. I'm going to fall in love with the way your smile dances across your face every time you see me, I'll fall in love with the way you lose yourself int he things you love, I'll fall in love with the way your voice fluctuates depending on how you're feeling, I'll fall in love with the way you say my name, and I'll most definitely fall in love with you so much more. I'll study everything about you, I'll remember the slightest details about you and your life. I'll know what you look like when you're upset without having to say a word, I'll know how you like your coffee in the morning, I'll know exactly how long it takes you to get ready before we go out, I'll know most of the trivial things about you and the rest I'll learn along the way. I pray you'll be able to do the same as well.
If you're still reading, and you haven't run away... I'll probably be sitting across from you looking insanely nervous and insecure. I'd be sitting with my legs folded under me on the chair anxiously waiting for your reaction. On top of that, I'll probably be ready to burst into tears of happiness or tears of sadness.
So to end this letter, I'd like to say thank you. Thank you for giving me a reason to live again, thank you for proving to me that love really is meant for me, and thank you for being my reason to be alive.

Love,
*Your Future Soulmate

Not at all confident in where I stand
Not at all full of any fully formed ideas on the matter at hand
I am unsure
That I am
Who I think I am
That I am
What my hands create by their actions
If I am forming my own dissatisfaction
I
Get lost
In the
Mazelike craters and crannies of my wandering and cynical mind
As it fluctuates to attempt to avoid the pattern of divine
Revelation that just might bring my doubt, wandering, and day to a point of
Disintegration,  I suppose this is a twisted and muddled form of self alienation
Maybe. . . Or am I mistaken?

Poetry to me is the expression of one’s own heartbeat.
Just as its rhythmic presence fluctuates or subsides at different intervals of our lives.
Poetry is universally recognized by all.
There is an immediate touch
Melancholy
Yesterday
Tomorrow
Skulking somewhere in the deep
The voices echo
Through my head
The voices are foreign
I cant quite make out the sound
But you are here I know
Please kiss my love
I say to you
Kiss the thought I have so new
In the shadow of the dawn
There was the touch
That everyone looks toward
The light...

My twilight poetry

Debbie

Electricity fluctuates
Darkness, light, darkness, light
I will find my way out
But the problem is too complex
For a quick getaway

I see a flash of God
Then the devil
Then God again
Then the devil
It never ends

It's torture
I don't know whether the light is better
Or if the darkness is
To be honest
I just wanna be dead already and be
Buried six feet underground
Where I can hear no noise
From any person at all

Electricity fluctuates
Darkness, light, darkness, light
And what I'm doing now
Is trying to not give a ****

i see things in high definition colour, but
july is the only month that fluctuates—
between florida orange and, later, burnt sienna;
everything between the 1st to the 31st
is dipped in a honey-glaze of three things:
1. warm, sticky air
2. the feeling of 6pm
3. bicycles riding through fields of fireflies.

naturally, i spend most of july in my bedroom—
the heat gets to me, makes my allergies flare
and i watch movies; old, 80s, movies (or—tiktok clips
of the same movie, only broken up into thirty-six parts
that i view from my bed with my naked legs spinning vertical circles through the air).

i always forget the feeling of august
until it’s there again. july
overshadows it with the final embers, so i only realise
it's august on maybe the 5th or 6th. almost
a full week into a month that my brain—
which is never wrong about the way things feel—
sees a deep, ocean blue.

i don't write home about august. i don't hurry it up
through winter months, when i begin the countdown
to hot, hazy days. if anything, i view august
as the ending of something, of a summer i wished so hard for.

and every time, it blindsides me with love.

i love things more in august. i love the smell of summer-
rain on the pavement. i love songs i listened to in january.
i love waiting around for halloween. i love my bedroom,
the pause of heat-sick sleep, the blue-sky mornings.

i write love letters to autumn in a time capsule. i text july and ask u up?, and wyd?, and come over?

and still, when summer ends, i will never want to get what i wish for.

I am not of darkness, but i'm in the dark.
If I am not lost, I am slowly losing it.

As the Babylonians babel on, i wander on,
lost while wondering when the future shall fall.

Shalom, shalom,
and into the night of day we go.
each with flame that flutters and fluctuates amidst the noise of reality,
certain to ignite a side to the worlds duality.

there is a lost freedom in this land,
and if we are but angels
we are but angels at war with God with gods.
and if we are but gods
we are as foolish as they come.

is this darkness on the dawn?
shadow in the night,

find the light

find the light

find the light.

Even I whose soul is as the night can love its loving bright.

Chin up
What are you looking down on for?
I heard you were the winner of this contest
Why down
When you are already in the up

Your life is as high as the clouds
Tiptoeing on the gold
When every floor shines to you
People latch on you like a magnet
Hoping to leech off some basket of your talent
To me and the eyes of the envy, that is not humility
It is nothing but vanity

You have the neatest work
Organized and logical
Most understandable and desirable
You have the cheeriest face and smile
You have the coolest of fiercest lies
You have done the impossible
You have the peaceful of memorable
You have the breath freshing life
You have a simple but satisfying affection
You have somebody willing to sacrifice for you
Best of both worlds connection

You do not have a broken brain
That fluctuates on every thought train
To me, I see rain
Instead of the bow's grains
You do not faint
In world's every little madness added with vain

You stay rooted on your spot
Defending yourself even when the fire's hot
Dare playing forget-me-not
I ask myself everyday
Why cannot I be strong?
Why cannot I be independent?
Why cannot I be more talented?
Why cannot I be clean?
Why cannot I be innocent and still loved?
Why do I keep thinking?
Why cannot I just stop?
Why am I surviving?
Why
Why cannot be like them?
Why cannot I be like you

Always never enough
Improves but fails
Told to be yourself but I am tired of doing both the appropriating and the disappointing
Always hurt
Always inviting pain
Nothing to gain
With my self pitying
With my self degrading
Demotivating this miserably, hopelessly beating, drowsing heart
As I long stare on

Is it me
Is it you
Is it everybody
That I am crying out for this?
Repeating the celebrity thinking
To prevent sinking
You have to keep sailing in everyone's mingling
To forget what you are actually dancing
What you are living
Until you are completely failing
Fading
Because we are all missing something
Then blame it on everything

It is hard to maintain the:
"Just sing and soon everyone will respect you."

Revolt from the cold of the wind,
She spares know waste of energy
Under diluted skies and foreign stars,
The mask comes off
Reveling the reflection of flawed
Simply dark
Indulged in silence,, for words cannot capture everything
She exfoliates a still heart
However in her stillness,
Everything fluctuates
Leaping and bouncing and ******* around
In silence there is no stillness,
For stillness is a state of mind
Just as imperfection is perfect,
So is she
Adversed to love or not,
Embrace your footprint I say
Mankind's impeccabilities remain flawless
Disastrous and miraculous art formed off original memories and emotions.  
Expect the unexpected for it drips of meaning.
A comfort to all wanderers and squatters I hope.

I live the life of a metaphor
Leaking out of stolen pens
I've been carved on pieces of wood
And people still interpret me differently
I choose to remain indestructible
My worth fluctuates with the readers taste
I make a difference in some places
I might just go unnoticed
Like a wilted rose and it's bleeding petals
Lying behind the window pane
I represent the spectrum
In the gray tinted universe
I'm forced into the anecdotes
In places I don't want to be
Creating a dark impression
Like a mirror in front of the wall
Mocking at its own reflection.

We talk with
The flitting understanding
Of space
Between two feeding birds.

Eyes look away
And return eagerly
Waiting to transmit
More of the feeling.

The feeling
Between us both
That both implodes walls
And builds them.

The feeling
That blushes in our words
And makes our silences
So loud.

The feeling fluctuates
Softly around our eyes
And strokes us both
With intangible caressing.

Stare at me.

Speak with me.

Be silent with me
For no matter what is said
Or unsaid
I am getting
An earful.

We romanticize sadness blindly
even if it is not our intention;
we are programed to believe in the
tall boy saving the girl that is wilting like a flower
and the soft kisses that diminish the hurt.
We believe in the coffee
and the tea
and thick blankets that envelope your cold skin
and most importantly: we believe in the pain.
The truth is that pain really isn’t truthful at all
and it fluctuates like the beating of a heart.
We like to think that one day the sting of our sadness
- which is questionable to begin with -
will  be washed away and replaced with the feeling
of one’s hand entangled lovingly in yours.
Sadness is not beautiful,
It is mostly just sad
And I advise you to erase the somber pulsing of your blood
And soak up the pastels that are hiding in your room –
Marinate yourself in every dip of a cloud
And then baste in the laughter of a pretty stranger.
This is all much easier written than done
As are most things

What do I deserve?

My answer fluctuates between love and death
you see

Curiosity didn't exactly **** the cat
It just left it crippled in the road
For someone else to run over

Is this so wrong, this self destruction.
All you need is love
To bring you down and demolish
Every ounce of self-worth, but
Is this so wrong.

The luster that comes and goes
Sustains not myself
For lack of sustenance will be the end of me
And love, the fickle jester
Taunts and flaunts her invaluable charms
Just out of
forever out of reach.

It was never about possession.
It was about yearning to feel. It was about the immensity I was drowning in with every look of his eyes.
Feeble was I for feelings were taken away from me at many stages of my life; and greedy was I for I was given back, all at once, what I had lost and this time as well, it wasn't mine to take.
I hold on to anything that moves me, even when my arms extend out of my body and I feel the world at the tip of my fingers, I hold on to it because my being fluctuates with it.
I am in love with whatever holds love, with whatever represents it and it's consuming - to feel so deeply, so dearly, so beautifully and know that this as well will be taken away from me.
Probably nothing you encounter is yours, not even your own body, but as long as you get to have it, even for an instant, take it, love it immensely, and if it goes away, it would have been nothing but felicity - felicity embedded with gorgeous memories which, at the moment of redolence, would scar.
But the scars will heal, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not in a month, maybe not before your birthday, but they will heal.
It is all in your head, and sometimes it is hard to keep control of it, but you will look over it and life will go on for you and feelings will flow your way then ebb away then flow your way then ebb away again and you will be granted memories soft as clouds in a calm January sky.
Only don't be afraid to feel, no tree would blossom in spring if it hadn't forsaken all of its leaves in autumn.



- LynnAA

The bell rings and we hurry to our next class

Run out of time on an exam and it’s too late

We are in a constant race against time

Time like a cat chasing a mouse

We flee only to be caught again in its wrath.

The universe fluctuates rapidly

But for some reason

We organize ourselves with time

In an unorganized world

it’s the wailing ones that always crack first
you can hear their cries any time of the day

wide eyed and stumbling, they walk among us
hands, either shaking or ****** mice
hiding amongst arm and tightly knotted torso

you won’t watch it happen
you don’t get to see the shatter

it happens with a horse’s tail dipped in cement
dragged along a body filled trench
type of movement that required
a lot of dead people

the mothers listen to it
unwilling ear glued against keyhole
unwilling hand held in the ambulance

the doctors try to explain how the wailing
fluctuates between needle piercing eardrum
and icicles shoved in mouth-holes
and the mothers cannot listen to it

Until my last cigar burns,
I turn my head to the other.
without knowing my instincts,
thank you for your understanding.

Until the last drop of this whisky
punches its way through.
imperfections I make.
but you do not see though.

Until the last appreciation was said.
until my last order you are not following.
so, to whom it will cherish?
thank you for your understanding.

Until my last affection fluctuates.
to the rules you are still not listening.
I might release you from this cage,
Thank you for understanding.

when i was a sophomore in highschool
it seemed like half of my class gave themselves stick and pokes,
homemade DIY tattoos out of india ink and mom’s sewing needles
etched dot by dot into their skin.
we were sixteen;
we all wanted to be something permanent.
but even the ink fades eventually
and all that’s left is discolored skin and scars.
everything fades eventually.
even we all decompose eventually,
but i’ve been trying not too hard to think in terms of a legacy
because words like that are so heavy.
i don’t want to work so hard to have something to leave behind
that i have nothing while i’m here.
everyday the number of our hours fluctuates
with every little decision we make,
everyday the length of our legacy is determined
by what we’re leaving behind in our wake.
i'm afraid i've been taught to plan for the future so thoroughly
that it has stolen my lust for the now.
i could tell you my five year plan
but i’m not sure if i could tell you why i want to get up out of bed tomorrow
or what makes me excited to be alive.
in planning i’m always looking down at my hands,
always looking ahead of me but never right in front of me.
i’ve been trying to build a monument
but i forgot to make it mean anything.
so wash me away like footprints in the beach,
i was never really here unless i was with you anyways.
i have an ink-stained love letter and camera roll full of memories
as a testament to what was, or better yet to what wasn’t.
and everybody told me not count hours, but you know i never listened.
none of us ever listened, cautionary tales like warning signs
and we ignored them all.
we were all sixteen, getting chipped down and broken up
for the first time and we all wanted to be whole again.
you can put back together fragments,
but you’ll still see where the cracks were.
you take your broken bones and you learn to splint them
until they heal up,
until you only remember when it’s raining and you’re aching
for something you thought you buried.
we just a bunch of fistfight kids getting out of love
with ****** knuckles and smirks like “you should see the other guy”
we were all each other’s punching bags
and i think we all liked bruises
because we thought if we pressed them than they’d scar,
then at least something would stay permanent.
but it was 4 AM, all the hours flew away and all my tattoos were stick on.
you were always right and i was always wrong.
so let’s pretend that all this empty street in front of us is really ours
and let’s get pulled over for noise disturbances
like we were always laughing too loud, scared shitless
and staring at each other’s faces
in the red and blue lights until everything looks purple.
let’s stay out until the sun starts to rise like we’ve got nowhere to be,
fumbling around with bottle openers and each other’s hearts.
let’s do things not just to collect experiences,
let’s do things not just to say we did.
let’s do things that will only be immortalized by stories
because i think that’s why we tell stories, or at least i know that’s why i do:
the need to be remembered staves off the fear of being forgotten.
and i am no exception,
i don’t care about the slowly expanding sun, i just… want to be someone.
you see it’s just that a lot people want to go out with bang,
but i ain’t trying to go out at all.
because i used to be terrified of being forgotten,
i used to be terrified of leaving this world without so much as a foot print.
i remember i wanted to be quoted,
i wanted my words to live forever even if i had no pulse.
i wanted to know about immortality.
and i’m not all talk, i’m all writer’s block;
unable the eloquently string myself together like poetry.
because i’ve learned words don’t make you permanent,
they just make you a little harder to wash away.
and photographs don’t keep things from fading,
they just make it hurt more to remember them.
i’ve learned words just prolong death, they don’t dispel it.
so let’s do this.
it’s the closest i’ll ever get to the fountain of youth,
to undeniable truth, to lasting.  
let’s do this, let’s tell stories, let’s talk tongued tied with poetry.
again and again, every night.
let’s get on stage and root around in our chest cavities,
try to find where we misplaced our hearts for a start
and then try to find all the truths hidden inside ourselves
we always swore were there.
because this is the only time i feel like the world can’t knock me down,
because this is the only time that i wouldn’t even care if it did.
because i always want to feel like this.
i want to feel like i matter for one fleeting, fleeting moment.  
because if i could capture this moment in my hands like a firefly
then it would still die.
it would still die even if you had to pry it out of my cold dead fingers.
so something is not good because it lasts.
something is good because it matters while it did.

Your fingers like petals that fall upon my skin,
the aroma fluctuates on the membrane of
that which alternates between the
                            vessels
of what tells me to
                              gravitate
between the consequences of conciseness  
and consideration. I'm whispered upon
to accept both realities..

But innuendos are the motions
                          that make me linger
on the words you weave within my heart.

Can you ******* smiles when I look at you
when your not observing.

They are a confectionary that is only visualized
when I steal an embrace when least expecting
my lips to collect candy from your thoughts.

Poetry to me is the expression of one’s own heartbeat.

Just as its rhythmic presence fluctuates or subsides at different intervals of our lives.

Poetry is universally recognized by all.

There is an immediate touch

Melancholy

Yesterday

Tomorrow

Skulking somewhere in the deep


The voices echo

Through my head

The voices are foreign

I cant quite make out the sound

But you are here I know

My poetry speaks

It says to you

Kiss the thought I have so new

In the shadow of the dawn

There was the touch

That everyone looks toward

The light...

My twilight poetry


“If it is a miracle any sort of evidence will answer but if it is a fact than proof is necessary.” Mark Twain



Debbie Brooks 2014

today i realized that it might not matter how hard i try. i might not be able to fix myself. i don't know how to connect. everything and everyone gives me anxiety and bores me and confuses me and i don't know what type of interactions and words to select HAGSDJUSKRVYEURSYBEISEVBRKHVFDJHJ

sitting on the corner of depot and main and i'm staring into the forehead of a bleach tan middle ager with a plaid shirt that looks like easter died. im good except i thought summer was like a door with an exit sign but i forgot it's not always greener at the end of the ride

are there ends to these rides? the speed fluctuates faster than i'd like sometimes, i don't know how to adapt to
anything, really.

coping is hard i'll give them that much. no one to call. no one inside me feeling like trying at all.

i always rhyme by the end of these
spreading wings at the end of it all
but i was never too good with estimates
and fast
we
fall

The misunderstanding is in trying to understand, standing next to lamps in the dark, afraid to embark into the unknown, knowing that knowing is knowing nothing while still quietly judging, but its something to embrace, something to fill the hole, that gently pulls it all into my guts, carrying the burdens with my clutch on the unheard of.

I walk a path of fear with masks to disguise my lies with truth to help me through the illusion of you, holding my hand along the way.

The path is finite, and all encompassing, as it fluctuates into something more appeasing for my needing of a dream to light the way, with telescopic tears, and blinding happies, i'm learning things i already knew.

my professor tells me that
'we often infer our attitudes through behavior
rather than direct action through intention'
so i'm picking apart
my every move - rewind, re-watch, repeat
the black & white play continuously fluctuates
through infinite shades of gray
as i'm retracing, re-reading between my swiveling lines
to interpret my flip flopping flightiness
i'm flitting across the floor
and my forward motion propels me backwards
into a merry go round of maybe, possibly, & sort of
blurred up & down, up & down, round & round
past decisions that I regurgitated
and now re-ingest to reinforce their meaning
but the recurrent ambivalence I taste
keeps my see-saw heart swinging
and i'd love to have a hand to hold
but all i'm finding are holes to sink into
and the blanket of darkness provides a comforting
lack of sight, but growth lies in the light
so i'll backpedal with all my might
hop on your rocket ship & take a deja vu trip
to the land of indecision where our hearts live.

The world is sad, I've noticed.
But it is also happy.
Like the way you feel on the first Christmas without a loved one.
At times like those, I find, the meaning of life can be blurred.
It can be swayed.
It can be lost.

As humans, we question,
it's in our blood,
even at a ripe age,
children begin to question.
Once the questions begin, mystery seems to be lost.
There is no santa claus anymore.
There is no tooth fairy.
There are no happy endings.

Life wasn't meant to live with happy endings,
with free presents from a magical man,
from money when biology takes its course.

In life, we are meant to feel,
every emotion that is evoked by it.

When the sadness comes,
it's because we are meant to be sad.
The times we feel the lowest,
are the things we will look back on when we feel the best,
and wonder,
how we ever let it get that bad.

When happiness reigns over all,
it's because we are meant to be happy.
These times in life we will smile,
and we will look back on the times we felt so low,
and wonder,
how could it ever get that way again.

Without the emotion,
that fluctuates from our being,
that pulls our heart,
and sometimes tears it out,
we wouldn't know if we were real or not.

I wouldn't know that I love you so much I hate you.
I wouldn't know that I am sad when you leave, meaning I miss you.
I wouldn't know that I'm angry with you because you don't feel these emotions for me.
If I can't evoke emotion from you,
how am I going to be the one
who makes you
feel
real









I can't believe it ended up being about you again.

Glad she's glad now.
That she shines herself,
So high and,
So bright,
Leaving the shadows of a broken man behind.

But, my clock hasn't ticked,
So here's to the other side.

Somewhere between the lines,
Somewhere between Hades and Zeus,
You(?) still roam below her clouds,
Hidden underneath the wisdoms of her books,
Her strength out of your grasp;

You constantly beg the hands of time for sympathy,
As you wait,
For the point of realization to tear you apart,
And wail at you,
"ALL OF THIS IS'NT WORTH IT"
(Straight into your soul)

Your head's stubborn,
Your heart's numb.
But people don't know,
That it isn't a matter of choice,
But people don't know,
That there are ways in,
Without ways out.
That why would they even care?
They'll only learn look at you with their heads thinking,
How it's such a shame,
That your faith fluctuates like the flickering lights.
So much desire to ignite,
Yet no sources of befitting power.

And it goes on, and on, and on.

Khai,
The night reminds you,
Of how everything used to be.
Yet it tells you,
It's time you look at the moon and stars differently.

It never stops, Khai.
It never will.

- Khairul Anwar

depressed is not an adjective
like beautiful or funny or intelligent,
it is not a compliment
or a feeling that fluctuates.

depressed is not an adjective
to use lightly as a way to say
you are temporarily upset by an inconvenience
because something didn’t go your way.

depressed is not an adjective
to throw around like stones on a river,
like a frisbee playing catch with a puppy,
like words without meanings.

depressed is not an adjective
to be romanticized
it is not a beautiful way of begging a hero
to save you.

because if you realized
depressed is not an adjective
you’d realize
we don’t need your heroism.