I met you in the cold but you looked like the fire I’ve been chasing.
I could imagine your kiss and the trails on my back you could be tracing.
You could walk me in a hike and take my sanity for a ride.
You’re something so in between that you're almost reminiscent of me.
My chest quakes and rumbles when I see you near and I can’t hide the feeling inside.
You see me avoid your eyes because I know I’m not really good at dealing with my feelings.
I just try to ignore the knot in my heart and I know that's not wise.
You burn around me in these woods with the friends you’ve known longer.
Then you talk to me and the burning halts so fast when I wanted it to grow stronger.
It just seems like I can’t write you a happier soul
And you, like the others, are a human I can't control.
You looked so warm and so red,
So yellow and so orange.
You looked like summer in a text unread,
A new beginning in my garden of flowers.
You looked like a mess of marigolds.
My favorite view through the sun and showers.
Florida rain may not have been good for you but you shined anyway.
It would just be nice if you dreamt of loving me the same as I do every day.

Maybe if you hold me closer,
Tighter than you've ever held,
You could hold in all my fears
And all the bad words I’ve yelled.
You could keep together my pieces
And make me feel whole again
But we both know you’re not glue
And you can’t close the cracks in my skin.
You wouldn’t be a permanent solution
But I could at least feel complete
If you could lay me like concrete.
Maybe I’ll last longer and be functioning
Knowing one day a crack will break me apart.
I just hope by then I’ll learn to let the earth beat its heart
And I’ll have flowers growing from my faults in spring.
You know I love the weeds,
So I hope I become a home to the grass and flowers we don’t let grow.
I’ll be the ground that feeds
And I’ll be the land you can’t mow.
I won’t move and I’ll let my shattered pieces breathe new
Because you may have helped me not feel broken but maybe being broken is what I was meant to do.

You use the ******* to drown the pain.
It makes you feel good and feel fine
While your life flows down the drain
Of a sink you don't use to clean yourself.
Your chest aches when you wake
And your stomach flips because of the limit you always exceed.
You can't do hard liquor but there's no slowing your beer intake.
I can feel your existence shudder and shake
From your core you freeze in this snow.
The high you can't get from the life you let yourself live.
I stand here watching you die and you love to tell me how I don’t know
But the sad thing is I know I could be you.
It's something I feel every day that I’m afraid to do.
My life is nothing like yours and I can’t even compare.
You pass out in the doorway and never wash your hair.
When I met you my body began to attack itself
And I tried to remind you of what love could feel like
But the cold in your chest could never love back
Because I don't think you know what it feels like to begin with.
So starved for food, for love, for purpose that you treat it all like a myth.
I tell you it's not healthy and you try to convince me you're not human.
You act extra trying to convince me you're an extraterrestrial
But I’m expecting to one day soon attend your burial.
You scare me with how dead you want to be.
I’ve made jokes about dying but it's never something I planned to see.
Here you are digging your bed and filling such pain in your head.
The alcohol is your next demon and it's the swimming pool you'll live in
Regardless of the drugs or cigarettes because I know sobriety is not your strong suit.
The ice may overtake your body but the river will flood your mind
And it's not the kind of problem you can fix by being a brute.
You try to fight away all the words and all the eyes you attract
Because I don't think you can handle if the words are a fact.
The medical world is focused on our elders and their dementia or Alzheimer’s disease
But I feel like it's worth stating that alcoholism or your addiction is on the level of these.
People my age are drinking and smoking until they forget.
They forget themselves and the ones they love because they want to escape everything they feel is a threat.
You'll wake up shaking and crying about the pain you're in but not remember the night you lived,
All the fun you might have had or the horror you might have inflicted is lost by the time you awoke and writhed in agony.
All my words are dead and I can't revive them again to try to remind you of something you never learned.
You can't remember anything and you wonder why I’m concerned.
You're living with a disease and it feels like a lie to say you're even living.
Your happiness is not in a bag and not in a bottle because those thrills are unforgiving.
I wish you'd listen to me.
I know you're lying if you say you're free.

You're a full moon
That illuminates my car at night.
We could have a love like Bonnie and Clyde.
You could steal my heart and I could try to steal yours.
No one knows the rhythm and hums you play behind closed doors.
We could make music together
And maybe the world would treat us better.
You'll lose your toes and what's left of your mind
While I marry a man who leaves me so easy to find.
Behind bars we dream of the other
Or the love for our fathers and mothers.
We start with our bullets in cases
But they get blown into the wrong places.
Now with the holes in our chests that we could fill with the love of another,
We sit and hold together as our bodies waste because we wanted to love each other.
I had been so afraid of the dark
But with my moon in the sky I could see my mark.
With my eyes closed and my head on your shoulder,
I couldn't imagine us getting older.

The thought of your touch burning through my skin.
I look into your eyes and it feels like I could fall in.
Empty words from your mouth but I can't listen.
The weight of your jaw hangs higher than mine.
I can feel my body thawing as I live in fire.
My home is a haunted house owned by a beautiful liar.
We spend what feels like an eternity before I expire.
Time never moved as fast when I was on fire.
It just proves that your love made me insatiable
In a world unstable.
Now I crave the heat more than I craved the earth.
My home in the dirt can't keep me warm
Because on my skin is your haunting burn.

The ghost in my closet
The bones in my chest
Broken and unwanted because my heart was ripped from its nest.
A forest of ebony, the bones they rose.
Calcified trees as tall as all my men.
Bushes made of all my empty pens.
Hikers trail me and wander their feet into my center,
Stomping through me they ***** up the way we were.
She takes my hand and drags me through the mud.
He takes my head and holds under my river of blood.
My rickety limbs find the pen to hold
To write a forest that you never knew could be so cold.
The ice covered it like vines,
Snowflakes in every line.
My bones, my skull, they were frozen in place.
These elementals could never decide how to leave me or let me end my chase.
The fire erupted quickly within me,
The forest began to burn down.
I didn't start the fire but it was the sweetest sight I will ever see.
Because I know in that forest of bones was the love we had been trying to drown.
Despite being the fire that took my home
They managed to be the worst pain I had ever known.
I thought being burned from the inside was a hell I couldn't have earned
But being frozen by them was a hell that I was glad had burned.

I was half asleep in my bed with nothing but dreams filling my head.
My mom was working on her computer while the house slept around her.
On the porch was my dad, smoking his pack and watching the sun rise while the outside cats searched for a bug to attack.
Then there was a shuffle and a big roar as seven to ten men burst through the door.
All while yelling and pointing their guns did they lower us to our knees.
No kings for to kneel but what do you do when they yell freeze?
A gun on my chest and a pair to my side that which never shot my body but the wounds were almost implied.
Thrown to the ground in a single motion, these men shackled my hands behind me.
They walked me past my mom frozen in fear.
On our lawn, we sat just after dawn for our neighbors to watch our house get raided by men in SWAT gear.
The day ended with no clear finish but the problem went dormant for a day or two.
Next, he was taken out of the blue.
We bought him back for a few months more before we let him leave us with the kind of void you can’t ignore.
Everything started to break without him.
One by one our house fell apart and so did we.
I heard my mom cry every night just begging for him to be free.
21 months predicted they said and he got out 3 early for good behavior.
18 months until you are free again they said, 18 months to try to not end up dead.
Forever branded for something that doesn’t make sense to me.
Forever reminded of what he had to see.
He’s home now but I can’t say he’s free, because he didn’t deserve this.
We didn’t deserve this.
Our home is dead.
They didn’t wound a body but they killed the happy thoughts in our head.
That house is a reminder, that house is not a home.
All the fear and the sadness that lives in those walls.
The days we spent waiting for his calls.
We weren’t alive.
All we were able to do was survive.
We all made it out of that entire ******* year and a half, and now I spend all my time just trying to make my family laugh or smile.
I’ll be ****** if I have to watch them cry again.
To be honest, I’m afraid.
I’m hopeful.
I know deep in my soul that this was ******* and that my dad is not a criminal.