Oakes-photo, hypocrisy and flagrant mirky plateau. Brimming celestial warrants overcrowding public housing systems. North-South lights, sell costly iPhone Apps; and then there are Social Societies of non-verbal delight. Password protected non-profitable and over-costly educations of no reward or biblical synonyms. Catastrophizing hash-tag dot.com. Weary party going poster children with glowing anemone guts, fruity looped cantlings, ravenous scattered supper clubbed coughing up ******* on their strange and central affairs unit. Overcome the candisation and sugary affairs of any of the ***** and pops that erstwhile matter less and less. We are speaking of nomenclatures that don't arise. Promises and by which confession aloof romanticizes every Tom dicking Mary that carries the theory of sustainable energy, prussian blue, and irregular browsing.

The sunset throws the people into silhouette,
The rolling hills into sharp relief against themselves.
It romanticizes the world,
Like for once there is such a thing as freedom.

Age watches the clock and the calendar at end of day,
Youth watches the setting sun.
Dreams can be so fleeting after all,
And time so indelicate.

Long live the youth in a world of disarray.
Long live dreams in a world of age.

Age searches for the meaning of life,
Youth finds life in the meaning,
Why else would we run away for but a single day?

The sunset paints brown grass gold.
Time paints gold moments brown.
The ocean sits behind the trees
But long ago it sat in the pockmarked sky
And fell,
Like sand to the bottom of the hourglass,
The House of Usher.
Long live that aging ocean,
Long live that youth in the sky,
Bright blue-white pinprick footprints
Left behind in existential black.
Long live the never ending sky,
The forever ending sea.

Naught but a memory of a dream now,
Petals of light catch on rivers of roads,
And we remember it like pirates do the ocean -
Free, formidable, fierce, forever.

Age throws memory into silhouette,
Light shines photographs into spots of glare.
Youth romanticizes the world,
Like once upon a time,
We were free.

I am here to tell you a little secret. It really shouldn't be one, but perhaps that is the main problem. I hope to somehow fix it. But here it is:

You are beautiful whether you believe it or not.

Here is a dangerous lie that our society and culture endlessly romanticizes:
• Beauty is skin deep.
This is the part where I prove them wrong.

Beauty is not skin deep.

Beginning at a young age, I developed an unhealthy concept of what true beauty was. To this day, I can still recall being twelve years old and devastatingly unhappy at my physical appearance staring back at me through my own reflection in the bathroom mirror. I saw nothing but ugliness glaring at me, the glass revealing all of my visible flaws. I didn't look like the girls in the magazines that scattered my bedroom floor, faces glowing like angels on glossy paper. I wanted to. I wanted more than anything to be comfortable being myself.

There was just so much that stuck out to me, so much that needed fixing. Curves in all the right places? Forget about it, more like a stomach that hung over my jeans. My hair was so thick that it snapped every single hair tie and couldn't hold a single curl. My nose sat awkwardly on my face, always something to sigh at whenever I would catch a glimpse of myself. My eyes were too dark, too brown to be beautiful. I couldn't grasp this idea of unattainable perfection, the kind of beauty that only exists on the airbrushed models on movie posters.

And because I could not love my appearance. I could not love myself. My self-confidence plummeted at this age, causing a wave of hysteria to envelope me. Trapping me in its embrace, this flourishing hatred began to consume everything that I was, distorting the visions of the potential I carried within me.

There was nothing beautiful about it, hating every single inch of myself. I was so busy trying to fit into the mold of the most gorgeous human being, trying to wear a mask of a person who turned heads whenever they entered the room. My mind had been wrapped around this idea countless of times to the point where I could no longer find anything worth loving inside of me.

But while chasing this idea of flawlessness, it was almost as if I had forgotten about everything else. The things that composed myself during that time period, the things that were not visible to the naked eye. The magnificent things that were present in me, that made me who I was- hidden by a wall I had put up by myself simply because I felt the need to hide from the judgmental eyes of an imperfect society.

Years have passed and now I love who I am. I am no longer twelve years old, but there are still many painful insecurities that plague me, except now I am strong enough to look at them and smile.

I have so much to be thankful for. Though I do not stand 5'7 like I had wished, I feel tall when I radiate kindness to the people around me. I do not have runway legs, but they are strong enough to leap through the air and run away from everything that no longer respects me. I do not have piercing blue eyes, but mine are capable of finding art in everything around me. I may not possess an hourglass shape, but I know how to use the time I am given to impact my peers in a positive manner. I may have bad days, but that doesn't mean I have to give up every ounce of faith and hope left within me. I may be ridiculously imperfect, but I am so outrageously real- and surprisingly, that is all I ever want to be.

The skinny girls in magazines and shirtless poster guys are still beautiful, but that doesn't mean that you aren't. To my boys- You can be attractive without a six-pack or a six-foot stature. And ladies, you can be stunning without a Kim Kardashian figure. You cannot be defined by a number that reads on a scale or the way your hair looks like when you forget to brush it in the morning. You are not labeled by the color of your skin, your athletic abilities, or whether or not your thighs touch when you walk. You are beautiful because you are you. The way you speak passionately about the things that keep you breathing. The way you laugh with your friends on the bus ride home from school until your sides feel like they're going to cave in. The way your eyes light up at the desire to understand, to learn, to grow. The way your smile spreads like the flu, even the way you fall asleep at your desk when you spend four hours finishing up the homework you could have finished two weeks ago.
You are made of blemishes, scars, imperfections, and insecurities- but they are just as wonderful as your soul. They are constant reminders of how far you have come, and the journey you have yet to fulfill. This is your life, and it would be a shame to go through it without leaving a mark.
They are the flowers growing in the sidewalk cracks of your mind. Do not let them be overshadowed by the debilitating weight of the world's words.

Let them grow, Let them be free.
Let yourself be beautiful for who you are
rather than who you are not.

scars are a blighted currency.
we speak in overstatements,
blood capsules and parlor tricks
translated villainy romanticizes eras of naturalism
our fate
in the balance of underwhelming prose
and i think i would know
cradled curses
baby i was born this way
you've got to catch up
puking emperors exemplify judgment lapses
and solidify an irreconcilable clash
the study of clinical lycanthropy
is just a step above and beyond the underwhelming

Vacancies left by death
are realized in life.
We wander across worlds
over time, dismissing the old
but there are some worlds
which we do not leave behind
and its the collection of these speckles
that make us realize the symphonies
camouflaged under the monotone of mundane.
Its these speckles that intoxicate us into nostalgia
and dejavu .
and yet its that one speckle that covers our eye
a rising sun that romanticizes the sky

I listen as he romanticizes cheating,
contorting it into “forbidden love”.

Let me real-life your fantasy.

For it would be a fallacy to judge
when I too, romanticize everything.

One who longs too much
        who romanticizes too often
        who dreams impossible dreams*

yet

when faced with reality
retreats to the dark corner

Sadness gathers in bruises along your hipbones
and in aches of metatarsals
when you're dancing alone at the bar, stumbling
over your feet, reeling into counters.

You greet 10 o'clock with the night's fifth drink,
searing the back of your esophagus--strong.
The spinning world around you romanticizes
loneliness.  There's nothing captivating
about swollen cheek bones and shaking knees
from the futile retracing of weary footsteps
in search of people and hope you've lost.

Misery crawls outside where radius meets ulna,
not for a party, but a bar fight,
full of drunkenness and hatred.
Pent up emotions carve flesh along your arms.

Emptiness pulverizes your ribcage,
plucked light guitar strings, your nerves cave
till you puke it all into an unwelcoming bathroom sink.

Despite all 206 bones,
you're never together in heart.

We've become a generation where-
suicide is glamorous-
self harm becomes a game of hide and seek
and eating disorders become a competition.
But nobody talks about the friends, and lovers who get left behind-
when things go too far.
The people who shudder at gun shots in movies,
and the people who can't walk past rope in a hardware store;
without choking up.
The people left with nothing more than memories.
Stuck remembering birthdays- and death days of people who left us too soon.
Friends and lovers, who were helpless in their efforts to change the situation for the better.
Those who are left behind, look for someone to blame-
ourselves, the world, society-
but in reality we will never know who to blame-
or if we could have even made a **** difference.
Our generation romanticizes pain and suffering-
"where it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt."

If I would have been in place of Shakespeare,
All my sonnets would have been about you.
My fantasies would fantasize about you.
I would have composed ballads and free verses,
On the letter sheets of my heart,
I would have written with a sparkling quill,
drenched in my emotions.

If I would have been in place of O.Henry,
All my short stories would have been about you,
About how we met and how I fell.
I would have penned novels and dramas,
On the sacred pages of my skin,
I would have written with a sparkling quill,
drenched in my emotions.

But, well, I'm nothing more than an
An ordinary girl who is in love with an ordinary guy,
Who takes her to extraordinary places.

An ordinary guy who holds her hand out of nowhere,
An ordinary guy who romanticizes every stare.
An ordinary guy who looks at her with love in his eyes,
An ordinary guy who is ready for her, to live and to die.
An ordinary guy who asks her " Can I kiss you? ",
An ordinary guy who makes dreams come true.
An ordinary guy who makes stars sing,
An ordinary guy who makes flower rings.
An ordinary guy who left himself for her,
An ordinary guy who painted her with love colour.
An ordinary guy who looks at her like she's the only one,
An ordinary guy who makes the beats of her heart run.
An ordinary guy who sings love songs,
An ordinary guy who makes right out of wrong.
An ordinary guy who makes her write,
An ordinary guy who encourages her to fight.
An ordinary guy who calls her life,
An ordinary guy who wants to make her his wife.

I'm nothing but an ordinary girl,
who is deeply and madly in love
with this ordinary guy.

How is it,
I feel more alone,
Alongside others each day,

Than I did,
Continuously in solitude?

People exhaust my heart.

Alone it idealizes,
Interactions,
Romanticizes,
Human nature.

Reality,
Weighs heavy,
And disappoints.

I'm not one of those people who believes that everyone is beautiful.

I see too much evil and hate in them to be able to classify everyone as being even foundationally kind, much less beautiful. Once darkness is seen in a personality, its appearance becomes altered.

Character is that thing that most poetry romanticizes. Because there are poets who will tell you that beauty is in the contents of your soul, and it's all about the little things you do like write notes on the back of photographs or dip fries in milkshakes.
And sometimes those people are right, but sometimes they're wrong too.
The character you have isn't all good. You must know to some degree that you're composed of much more than just the sappy  Disney qualities you've built up in your head. There's a reality to everything. As much as the spark in you that gives you meaning in your life is a foundation to your complexity, you're also formed by doubts, punches thrown at walls, tears that fell for no real reason.

See, those things, no matter what anyone says: They are not beautiful. They're terrifying, they're productions of awful situations and people and mentalities and monsters that can destroy you, and can destroy all the romanticized habits that makes you different and charming.
This is how we get the evil and hateful people.
The spark goes out in them, they get lost in all the doubts and dark thoughts, and all they want to is to feel the beauty again, but they can't. That's the irony -- they want something that they've rejected by going through so much ****.

They need to search through themselves and find the drive again, to get past all the awful things and inner demons. They need to go through old Christmas cards, and draw smiley faces on bathroom stalls. They need to exercise the ability to stop blaming, and resenting. Or else they'll become someone else's reason to lose the spark -- like a disease of desperation. Maybe it won't fix everything to try, not for a long time if the feelings are so strong and bleak, but I know from personal experience that the beauty will come back to everything slowly, even to yourself.

I'm not one of those people who believes that everyone is beautiful. I see too much evil and hate in them to be able to classify everyone as being even foundationally kind, much less beautiful. But the ones who look like they're too far gone, that they're helpless and don't even want help, they want it the most. They're not helpless, or too far gone. They can feel the beauty in themselves again, they just need to see it other things too. And when they do, maybe everyone will be beautiful.

And maybe they'll be kind to one another.

All my shirts have bloodstains,
I don’t suppose that’s good.
At night I’d never kneel and pray,
But I applaud people who do.

To write nowdays takes effort,
An effort I don’t have.
Nothing in my life romanticizes,
My pen goes through collapse.

It’s rare for me to produce a thing,
For things require production.
I will sit and stare and waste my days,
I fret over my diction.

My poems are fading.
My life is not.

Is this a metamorphosis of words?
That shift the paradigms of worlds?
Letters chasing the horizon?
****** for a raison?
Does the beam deviate request?
And then romanticizes the quest?
But yet, be it as it may seem,
Sacred be the question.