Who are you outside of my apartment door?
Someone with the capacity to entertain sadness
other than yours. You don't tell others what they already know- hating yourself is counterproductive. You can show patience
for an over-apologizer who cannot catch their breath. You're an expert at comfort as your tongue grows bouquets of lilacs to soothe, whispering sweet nothings. You believe in that place to plant them.
You're nobody's apparition but mine. So I welcomed your black shoes and wiped them off in the welcome mat of my brain matter.
Those footprints aren't yours, just as you don't eat animals alive, but you still are
and I am just a bone.
You're not in search of something to taste. You are merely repulsed by the thought of the remains. You simply love more because of your sophisticated palette.
You paddleboat on the coast, secretly embarrassed to admit you're happy, but cannot help condemn the curve of your lip. You hate to admit it, but you are someone who enjoys being alive. You think being a nihilist is a choice; someone just wakes up one day with the will to withdraw while indulging
the world without consequence. You don't poison yourself just to withstand two hours in the same room. You find vigor in the softness of the skin that is not mine, you feast, but you share a table.
You have your sunglasses on- they aren't atop the fireplace where I kept them safe in my backpack. I wished I had kept them. I believe the vengeful spirit will always come back for what was theirs. But that is not who you are.
And it would really just be another reason
to see you again.
You are someone who returns, but not to my arms.
Jun 14, 2022
Jun 14, 2022 at 7:22 PM UTC
I see your parched lips
like that of a dying rose,
the small cracks forming
are like an indentation of their own.
You speak in that same tone they once called me,
as if it isn't patronizing
to be treated as a child,
despite having adult skin.
This treatment makes me wiser
of the cruelty of love
or even the fear in thinking it exists.
The lost luster,
apparent just in this one bad day
and I remember the reoccurrence of rain,
with its strange heat smacking my face
I wore the same look you have now.
The feeling of leather,
the hurt of words,
an admission in not knowing what one was doing even in their creation.
It is not a need,
to water our own flowers that wilted so long ago.
I have established their presence,
but we still try.
Life blossoms through you,
those opportunities
the talent,
the potential
and urge to believe
you can trust somebody
to do better than you’re doing yourself.
There it is,
this beautiful symptom
and these gardens the cause.
The same thirst
we all died from as a sprout,
same blood we shared
being clipped too soon and
placed in a vase.
Jun 7, 2022
Jun 7, 2022 at 3:11 PM UTC
To shrink my resentment for
how open wounds heal faster
than any other part of me. The heart
is the last to leave the fight; blood, carnage
always willingly bright eyed
and bushy tailed at the idea
of opportunity. These eyes,
wet + tired of having to see,
to blink. My heart to
believe I write
things worth reading. This brain
to avoid the guilt in
taking up space in my skull
where words rented out vacancy.
My tongue, encouraged to
speak something meaningful
enough to save every life,
but mine. These stupid
words, verse like munchausen syndrome.
I cannot breathe or survive
on poetry. Why
would I ever want these words
to draw your blood? They already siphon mine with poison. I am already
guilted with anxiety and creation
remains only as rumination.
Already lost myself. There
is no beauty and
I can't make everyone
else lose me too.
I'll wake up
this afternoon
write something happy,
manifest it as truth.
believe in it like
a scar compensates
enough to prove
pain to be real. Like
this ink
proves I'm insistent
that I bleed.
Oct 16, 2021
Oct 16, 2021 at 12:36 AM UTC
At sixteen, I was easily impressed with conversations of tattoos, septum rings, and pipedreams that internal biases created a tendency to wonder if you’d smoke those too in the art room.
When you spoke of the desire for a “creation of Adam painting to be inked across the canvas of your arm.”
I was enchanted though, unaware my embrace and unorthodox philosophy of loving the dead back to life would never work; I mourned in consumption of you and remained in a ramshackle shelter where we had class together.
An oxymoron, truly.
There was something sinister that washed down the room's rusted sink than your murky paint water. Every day, as if on schedule I lamented the opening of my veins in preparation for the inevitable.
You re-arranged yours with the help of a syringe and my mind questioned how best to save your life.
The focus of my grief was full of wonder in who would die first, but at least loved.
I began to know, the meaning of fixation so well, my lips tasted different even a shared laugh felt pathetic, but not as much as knowing neither of us could drive.
I became your girlfriend Suicide, experienced and immersed in toxicity.
I hated myself so passionately in undoing myself so vigorously all in act of loving you.
Breaths were not allowed unless you said so.
My world became the word "sorry"- your prevalent command, love should not make you guilty in having a heart that beats.
But it was like a ******* thunderstorm when you opened your mouth,
"Are there are any tats you want?"
I remember you asked.
Today, I am aware of just how little I knew what I wanted.
I had sworn it was my mother's birthdate in Roman numerals, you disapproved and all in the spirit of mourning... I compensated and titled every poem about you in a similar fashion with the day we met,
but these journals had become a grave and shared spaces a graveyard.
Until sixteen, I was incapable of understanding this kind of ache.
I lied to myself,
that the mourning ceased in this season of my life, worse- I was your Adam.
An everlong ache.
I wish it had put me in my place because I did practically the same, instead of just blades that dug in
like your dulled needles, the pain felt in awareness never was. Always so obedient.
You held that deflated balloon filled with ****** over my head every moonless night in your mother's apartment.
I had to have known to beg was not love.
This was worship, utterly painful,
I recognize the role I have long feared as a martyr.
Your claim that I had made you so sad you couldn't feel anything became an incapacity for me though,
the sacrifices made in justifying broken things
function with the belief of no reparations are needed
and rather everyone should be as broken as you are.
You taught me the bruises from your crooked teeth landscaping my throat were entitlement.
Ownership.
These colors upon my flesh never meant you needed me.
You never wanted me, adamant you deserved me.
I was of convenience. This pain gave me something.
You were responsible for my rebirth, shut the door.
Another door opened that revealed who you are, rather another scar canvassing my body that I live with the intent of tattooing over.
Aug 25, 2021
Aug 25, 2021 at 1:21 AM UTC
To open my ribcage,
ink would spill around
***** feet and form
verses created inside this
sad sea of a mind, drowning
what surrounds. A firm
believer in common courtesy,
but not for myself as I never
write the line where I survive
maybe at least one
where I float above the surface &
remember to breathe.
Aug 11, 2021
Aug 11, 2021 at 8:09 AM UTC
He broke his neck thirty years ago
I break mine more with each
promise of keeping you in my life
but Ian Curtis is on my mind a lot,
grieving for souls I will never know.
Some of his songs are so sad,
like hearing the premature
snap of his bones
Cannot help but resent
how clever society is
to glamorize the unglamorous,
even I am aware
the flowers upon graves are not just for
aesthetics, but we are still always trying
to cover terrible tragedies
with beautiful things.
Am I just as guilty?
I cheat on you with him.
His spirit through my headphones,
hoped if I listen intently
the narrative changes.
purple marks on your neck
just that weekend you
taught me what a hickey was
and how they felt good
yours’ declare ownership,
not declarations of love.
You walk into art class,
purple painted across your throat.
If love could save Ian,
had I lived in the mid-seventies
he may very well have lived forever
and his throat painted by love,
rather than the bruises of a noose.
The letters I wrote you were in vain,
my mistake quoting those Smiths’
songs:
Morrissey is an *******
and so are you.
I still
am too scared to
wonder how far I am willing
to go
to reap the benefits of sorrow.
"New Dawn Fades"
tears into my heartstrings
feeling responsible in
the prevention of another
suicide
I grapple onto
what a savior complex was,
your dead father
the tracks on your arms made me cry
but I thought it was stupid.
It made me hate myself more
why could I not learn to undo
my drive to save anyone,
but myself
The phone call
where I broke up with
you and you
pretend to
overdose on the speaker
One of us had to grow up,
had to make it out alive
And I love you again,
every time Ian's ghost
sings Isolation.
And I leave you there,
sure, to end the album
after the final song.
Aug 9, 2021
Aug 9, 2021 at 10:31 PM UTC
In sixth grade,
I wrote a letter to David Bowie
addressed to his New York home never knowing
a girl named Kamryn exists,
but I thought I was special enough
for a world-renowned rock star to reply
or care enough about some pre-teen angst
I shared with him how my grandma Pam
chose drugs over (I know now an addiction has many more complex layers)
getting to know her grandchildren or
to love her son, but then I remembered-
this is David ******* Bowie, he's lived life
with ******* in his bloodstream for thirty years prior
Maybe, I mentioned it all
because I wanted to feel special,
like the way, I think dying young
will create that for me. It's stupid
how I painfully so-identified as
"the girl with the mousy hair"
and the piano aiding an eloquent
discussion about the world's disarray
in which I selfishly identified as my own
"Life on Mars" always felt like a personal performance
just for me, but at twenty-one, it isn't just a song
and I still lay awake wondering if Mars and I
share a similarity, we want life to ebb
so distinctly within us both.
Feb 18, 2021
Feb 18, 2021 at 8:04 PM UTC
The answer after being asked,
"How I'm doing?" was caught in my airway.
So I take a blade
and slashed across my throat-
Ink oozed from the seeping wound,
stanzas splashed across each page,
putting a hand upon my chest,
I felt purpose-
ripped it out.
My heart it bleeds,
in truths of me and
in thoughts of you.
The wonderment of what it was
that coursed through my veins,
describing the phenomenon
of how it rains,
or we allow ourselves to express pain.
Losing blood
and shying away from what other's think,
when transfusion began
they gave me ink.
Speaking of honesty,
I promise you-
when fear takes over,
I'll write for me &
I'll write for you.
Feb 16, 2021
Feb 16, 2021 at 6:04 PM UTC
My body is the bird
between a dog's gnashing teeth;
feathery and tossed. Potential
bruising in need of nurturing
or some ice. Even agony requires
a place to put its' head down at night.
For the comings and goings of
loveless transactions upon myself.
My body is also a broken bone,
desperate to fashion itself back together.
The whole of me--
empty pill bottle after pill bottle
hoping to fill itself up,
full of space, so capable of suffocation.
When tipped over on its' side, it's a spitting image
of the father I've only ever known
to run from anything that comes undone
I am also the snaggletooth
belonging to the woman of whom
I belong to. I have hit the radial artery
with my eyes
Bleeding out seems titillating,
but I refuse to touch my pout to
Death's puny **** It's a danger to touch
skin-to-skin, bound to get addicted.
For fear of closeness,
for fear, we become too much alike.
My face is the same as the blood in the sink,
inspired by neglect and the old war in my head.
For fear, sour breath can't be manipulated,
for fear, we'll share the same pair of eyes.
Feb 15, 2021
Feb 15, 2021 at 8:15 PM UTC