To you, my heart sleeve, You from whom I pull my feelings like fossils to examine. You my dictionary, my reference book, who helps define and label each one with patience and understanding.
You who lets me write her poetry, who lets me drip her love into these pages just so I may find a better way to know it. You who lets me turn you into poetry like we are in love even though we are not in love. That sounds romantic but maybe its not, maybe it doesn't have to be.
Once I went to a slam poetry night and a man told me that if you write more than one poem about a person you are in love with some parts of them. I have entire forests that bleed and weep your name because I write you so often. Maybe we are some kind of in love but I do not know with what parts or if its even worth saying aloud.
You my rock, the solid foundation on which I would build a home if given half a chance. Permanence of a kind I have never tasted before you.
To you, and you know who you are. My compass, the lighthouse guiding me to shore. I am missing you, as I have been missing you for every moment since we last parted, for every fraction of a second between now and the moment my skin stopped hugging yours.
To you, the owner of a folder in my phone, full of all the pictures and quotes I am saving for when you are ready to come back to me, for when your heart stops aching just enough to let me back in.
To you, the only person who will ever see the original version of this poem where I stitched every word together with your name, even though you may never see this poem because I do not know if I am ready for this yet.
Sep 2, 2016
Sep 2, 2016 at 12:53 AM UTC
Love, wherever you are, whoever you may be. Whether you are a face I know well or a stranger I have yet to meet, know that I have been waiting for you. When you find me, notice the little place in your soul where my love is aglow, already a small ember that has always lingered there, please do not be afraid to sit by its warmth.
Love, I know, I know I am a tad crazy, a little naive, but I promise if you tend to this ember it will keep you warm for longer than any flame could. I don't love much, I keep my heart a lock box with only just enough room for you but I promise that everything I am capable of will be yours as long as you are willing to ask for it.
Love, always ask. Always question. Never think that silent treatment is an acceptable method of dealing with problems. I am well acquainted with the silence of repression and I know that She solves nothing. Let us communicate so that there is never doubt, so we may never go to bed with anger and sadness.
Love, my days are not always happy, and even the good ones are often tinged by sadness but believe me when I say I want nothing but happiness in your life. I will always do whatever it takes to bring some light into the days when it rains the hardest for you, even when I cannot fathom my own sunshine.
Love, if you find yourself weary, wearing the weight of this world like a shroud you aren't strong enough to shoulder, invite me in. Let me bear the weight with you. Being by your side in any circumstance is easy for me, like I was meant to walk with you all my life. I will never turn you away when you ask for help.
Love, if you can't stand it, can no longer bear the burden of loving me with all of my crazy, with all of the darkness I have kept, don't be afraid to ask where the door is. I don't know much but I do know that if you want to leave I will not stop you. Just be sure to kiss me before you go so I can press my heart into your hands to be sure you have my love along with you.
Love, please try your best not to leave. I have watched too many people walk out of my life and I hope you stay, I always hope you'll stay.
Aug 5, 2016
Aug 5, 2016 at 11:39 AM UTC
I have starved past the point of hunger,
and continued til hunger came back only to leave again.
I have tried to slit my wrists until my sanguine blood wine poured like tears, like fountain, like waterfall.
All I have ever wanted is to make myself smaller, to shrink away from these haunted memories, from my tainted past.
Sometimes wishes come true.
I am dying.
I don't say that lightly,
this isn't a hearty joke to laugh at later.
I am dying and doing nothing to stop my personal decay.
They all pretend to worry,
ask if I'm losing weight,
Ask why I am so tired all the time but I never respond with any truth.
I've lost near twenty pounds in less than a month while still eating with consistency,
Yesterday I threw up nothing and saw blood.
My skin is so weak it is no longer a barrier between inside and out,
More like a ribbon at the end of a race,
one last thing to run through before the finish.
I am afraid that there is so much I will never get to reconcile with,
like the fact that I threw away someone I loved for the high,
The fact I may never really get to say goodbye.
I don't know what is the sickness to fear,
The one who won't let me breathe,
or the one who keeps love from me.
Jul 26, 2016
Jul 26, 2016 at 2:15 AM UTC
She's aching again, you feel it in the way your heart tugs, in the way you cannot breathe because it hurts, hurts, hurts. You're vomiting nothing into the toilet, haven't been able to keep anything down for days now. Deep down you know its because you are scared that she too will leap from the pit and wash down the drain. The kind of leaving no one comes back from.
So you're screaming now, hoping that promises of 'always' and 'you will never do this alone' hit home. Yet you have never known an always, just a lot of almosts and you are terrible at letting people in your world because you believe your destiny reads loneliness. But for her you'd be anything, anything at all to know she is here and breathing even if that means becoming something of permanence rather than the leaf in the wind you wrote yourself to be.
So you sit making promises of forever and always for the first time in your life because even though you always have one foot over the edge you'll do anything to get her to take a step back, because you love and she aches, because you love and can't help but feel all her pain.
Jul 22, 2016
Jul 22, 2016 at 12:24 AM UTC
Yesterday I seriously considered taking my own life. Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about how this was an exit sign, a real way out. Now I realize that it is no more than a doorway into another room, you still reside in the building but cannot see through the wall to the ones you love; those who love you.
You see suicide keeps you close enough to touch. Years will pass without healing because no words make your absence coherent, there is no easy disease word to swallow like cancer or crohns or complications. When you die by suicide you are immortalized by sadness, already depressed friends who will still mention you to their therapist in passing thirty years from now, with sadness, with cracking levee voice. Your pain lives in them now.
When my hands became more knife than weeping pen I called my bestfriend, asked 'why, why do you love me? How, how can you love me?' With laughter in her voice and heart in her words she explained and explained again,
"You are loved, you are cherished, you are worth loving. I won't give up on you. I love you."
In this she shared my pain with the first few men who did not make me fear my body, who gave an out pouring of love I still cannot comprehend. Even a stranger who still sees me faceless except for a few kind words, told me I was destined for more than this, more than a bloodied ending.
I'm holding all of this love in a lock box beneath my heart, the kind of stash I don't really need to hide or fear seeing the bottom.of.
Yesterday I was seriously considering final words. Today I am working on what I will say some future day to the friends who fought distance and depression to give me a reason to promise to stay.
Jul 19, 2016
Jul 19, 2016 at 9:30 PM UTC
Watching the shallow rise and fall of her chest. Trying to remember what the peace of actual sleep felt like. Counting the seconds between each inhale sounds like small prayer, a scream of please please please don't leave. She's lost weight again and you're doing your best to not panic about it, hoping that by not acknowledging the way death hangs around her shoulders he will spare her, spare you the pain of loss.
Its been two weeks since your ex promised to call you, and you're pretending that all the hope you had doesn't lay at the feet of a silent phone line. There is so much you want to tell her, things you can barely choke out to yourself, like the fact that you are still in love with her, that you're positive if it were anyone, she was the one. The only one who ever made your heart flutter like that, the only person who would understand how terrified you are of being permanently alone.
For now you lay on the cold floor, trying not to let two years of the one who got away strangle you, sipping warm wine and thinking that this was how it smelled the first and last time you trusted someone to touch your bare skin without flinching. You're watching this body on your bed taking shallow breaths, crying because you know that soon enough you will be alone again and she's never coming back.
Jul 15, 2016
Jul 15, 2016 at 9:21 PM UTC
I just returned to the place I call home and I'm already planning on leaving again.
And I know you're thinking you were only away a few days, a few more can't hurt but you see this is just what I do, this is that vice I cannot seem to kick no matter how many times I promise I'm quitting. Even the alcohol and cigarettes that stole the best years of my life don't compete with this leave-leave-leaving.
For some one who needs stability, who writes poetry in repetitions of three because her heart stutters compulsions, like embolism, like maybe it could **** me, like I don't wanna die, I have a funny obsession with making my life unstable. Always turning my world on its head, finding solace in strange places surrounded by different faces.
It never makes me happy, whether moving or stagnant I feel like I'm missing missing missing a part of me and I have no idea how to find it. It is the ghost that haunts me.
So I'm grabbing the bag I never bother to unpack, add to it my melancholy and the frightening 'what if' of my failing health, trying to not feel like a liar for promising I'd go see someone about it, trying not to feel failure in the fact that I don't know if I can stay long enough to see someone about it, trying not to feel like this is my way of kissing this life goodbye. Hopefully this isn't how I leave you.
Jul 8, 2016
Jul 8, 2016 at 12:01 AM UTC
The early morning after the holiday, after the fireworks fissle out, after the ***** dies down, I pick up the bag I keep in the back of my closet, packed with what little I own, evidence that I do not know the meaning of the word 'stay'. The fact that I never seem to need to unpack it only solidifies to me that I am not somebody who will ever know a true sense of home.
I am riding to a place I used to think I could consider a second home, with a sweet boy laying against my arm and I know that I should love this, two years ago I would have loved this. But everything just feels like a shadow of what once was, what I once was. I can't shake this sense that I may be missing something. That maybe I had a purpose but it was exploded into the night sky the minute that last firework sang its praises.
Holidays should not feel like funeral rites, they should not feel like sad goodbyes but I do not know how to be happy with the fact that another year has gone by and I am still here, still at the same crossroads between death and the rest of my life like some kind of suicidal vagabond.
All I want is to go home and not feel empty inside.
Jul 5, 2016
Jul 5, 2016 at 12:10 AM UTC
The last year of my life has been one massive panic attack,
some kind of nightmare without need for the night.
But in some things we find restitution,
the soul is returned to the vessel and the body begins a small sort of healing.
On the worst days,
when the noose winds its way around my neck,
when the 10 story fall doesn't seem so far anymore,
the little things keep my feet in the dirt,
keep my blood from leaving these tired veins.
When death opens its arms to welcome me,
to pull apart my wrists just to see how i bleed, I seek solace in knowing that out there exists arms that feel like home,
that a heart beats that my anxious mind does not hesitate to trust,
that there is a body who is the safest place I know.
I have never known a purer human love because it comes without want,
without need to be reciprocated,
But it is: it always is.
These past few weeks I have been making new friends,
People who already know more about me than the walls I grew up with,
more than the hands that kept me alive all these years.
And its because they understand what its like, to hold instruments close to find peace,
to use them to cry the tears your body cannot release,
to scribble your feelings into a notepad hoping that in someway it could dull the ache in your soul.
These people have only touched my life for barely two day's length,
yet I know that I would do anything and everything to keep them safe.
I am slowly learning how to feel again, how to give love without ripping myself apart, without bloodying the knuckles of my heart.
And i know, I know; I Know
One day I won't wake with this blood under my nails from crawling out of my nightmares.
And i know, I know; I Know
That day I will wake and know somebody loves me
The secret I'll learn is that they always did and I was just too stubborn to see.
Jul 3, 2016
Jul 3, 2016 at 1:04 AM UTC
Am I going crazy?
Perhaps one should define the term crazy,
maybe it is these moods swings: always violent but never long.
Or my hysterical crying in the early morning though I never remember what for.
On the days it rains hardest in the black of midnight,
I rise from slumber like the undead to stare blankly at the water-streaked pane and wonder
"Why me?!
Why was I blessed to hold a mind this heavy?."
In the spirit of my family name I never talk about it,
about the insane thoughts that run like school children in summer between my ears.
My father once told me he would love to see a psychiatrist just to sort some things out but I have to wonder how much a man with a family history of hiding yourself behind intellect and avoidance tactics could mean it.
My grandmother still doesn't call to tell us she's sick,
just mentions it as an afterthought,
a hey-I-forgot-to even as her husband slowly forgets everything he thought he knew.
Maybe I was born with this shame in my blood,
or maybe that is where this sickness came from,
My ever present thoughts and their not so secret toll on my wellbeing.
But since we don't talk about it I have to wonder:
is this just me?
Am I going crazy?
Is this why all good poets write?
Is this why they all **** themselves?
May 17, 2016
May 17, 2016 at 8:41 PM UTC