Connected by one stem,
Two wholes glistening together
Red in the warm spring sun.
I lower them to my lips,
And consume the both whole.
I pick the empty stem
And tie it in my mouth.FV
You bought me cherries,
every holiday.
I was never allowed to eat too many
But on that day I could have as many as I liked.
The day you died, I was tongue tied.
Everyone picked me up from school,
And I thought it was just because of Valentines Day.
But on the day that love usually comes, love left.
When I tried to wear red to your funeral,
My mother scolded me.
She said it was the devils color.
At the funeral, I was so mad you had left me.
I felt forgotten.
Afterwards, they presented me with a gift.
They had found them in your fridge.
Shining in the warm spring sun, I felt you with me.
Connected by one thread,
Two souls glistening together.

I’m learning to jump through rain puddles again,
even though I was afraid that some were full of glass.
I am starting to believe in superheroes again even though in between then and now,
I realized that heroine and ****** weren’t spelled much differently.
I’m starting to put the bandaids on my own scathed knees,
and whisper comforting words to myself when facing my dark, empty closet.
My social anxiety sits on my shoulders, but I am tipping him off of me,
and finding the childish ability to create friendship by just simply saying
“Hi, I’m B. And we’re friends now.”
The notes that I find in my lunchbox are the ones I left for myself,
saying “You got this! P.S. I hope you enjoy your fruit cup.”
Grey skies have always clouded over my mind,
but today I bought a rainbow kite and flew it through dusty, dreary weather in the park by myself.
I have been feeling so low,
that I forget how good it felt to climb a tree and be up so high.
There are still glow in the dark stars hanging above my bed,
that remind me even though I can’t see them, the real ones are always above me.
I have been so concerned with changing,
that I forgot the power of regaining.
When somebody else makes you feel inferior,
and you believe yourself to be less than you use to be,
remember that you once thought dandelions were flowers,
until somebody else told you they were weeds.

I have been depressed. I will not say am. This is a six year ongoing illness that is formed itself into a personality trait, and now an uncomfortable, casual day to day topic.
I wish I could take the heaviness out of the words “I want to **** myself.” because they have never felt like a heavy sentence to me. They are words that string themselves through my brain at least twice a day and occasionally can be formulated into joke at my expense.
I tried to **** myself when I was twelve. It was a two week long ordeal. I was a hospital project for a week, an out of home charity case for a week, and after that, it became a running joke.
“Do you still have a few screws loose?”
“Are you still a basket case?”
“How many pills you think you could swallow?”
Over six years, I have become a great actor. I am best at holding my tongue, swallowing my spit when my throat is closing, and pretending like I am breathing steady. I often laugh in the face of my problems and I distance myself from people when I feel rocks sitting on my chest so they don’t smell the rot of a dying conscious. I have never been untruthful either. Just honest in a way that wears a theatrical mask and relinquishes an audience from an awkward state of “wow, I’m really sorry.”
But some nights are the farthest things from jokes.
Some nights are all choking up on words that don’t make any sense and some days are “nobody actually likes you.” Some days are not having enough energy to do laundry or dishes and then  hating yourself because how could you, you’re so lazy. Most nights are complete self hatred and manic heaving into a wet pillow while your brother sleeps quietly in the next room.
The worst thing about depression is that it’s so uncomfortable. It’s become such an awkward conversation to me. It’s like coming out as something that nobody has ever seen before until it’s living in front of you. It taints everything I do with a feeling of disbelonging with the people that love me because I don’t believe that my depressed presence is comfortable enough for others.
But I am trying. Tomorrow morning, I will wake up to a sun that still shines, even if it is covered by clouds and I will still be depressed. I will pick up a book that  I haven’t started, and wait in a sitting room full of other people who are emotionally sick. I will be the same person that I am, and have been. And I will know that right now, I am also trying very hard to become so much more.

does hamburger meat stick together because it is still searching for the ghost of it's bones?
in college, i worked in a factory.
i trudged to work every monday morning at five thirty and put on gloves
to plunge into the sticky mess of beef that i weighed and clipped and submerged in.
the meat sticks together and bleeds into the same palm, which is my own.
i am livestock.
i am a nonsensical sticky mass of fat that is being pulled apart by another.
although i am trying to pull myself back together,
the bones i clung to were yours.

Sometimes my mind runs,
so my feet walk.
My brain is an unsorted file,
and my body is a disconnected server.
There are moments in life where I am so in love with it all that I cry.
Moments when I am so upset, I laugh.
I can not fully understand the loops that my mind takes
over and over.
But I still ride along them.
When I was younger, I use to be so scared of the mess in my brain.
But the truth is,
I am full of clutter.
I am the home of loved objects that is messy,
and lived in.
I am a cloud of multiple thoughts
that lead me to sing at the wrong times.
Love harder than I should.
Feel every emotion at once.
We are all cluttered boxes.
I promise you,
you are messy
but full of love.
And I promise you,
we will all be pulled
from the attic
and taken
back home.

Theres no use in pretending that I don’t think of you often.
But there isn’t any use in telling you if you don’t feel anymore.
I have no words to say other than
“Please, don’t do this.”
But i will swallow them and say
“Hello, whats your name?”
Your absence is everywhere,
in strangers that have done me no harm.
God gave you a common name,
so that I could choke every time
I meet with it again.
I need to know that I will find better,
but tonight I’ll find home in the middle of a hurricane.
A hurricane
with
a
common
name.

This is a very shortened version of the book introduction (my first oh geez) that I am working on. It's a concept collection based on the moments and people in our life that we often forget or overlook, though these moments create large impact on ourselves as people. We often find ourselves passing hundreds of people who's lives we will never touch. The strangers that allow us in for a short period of time are the people that touch our lives in unimaginable ways.


Do you remember the stranger who you fell in love with on the plane? How your entire life was built in seconds, painted with only the colors in the eyes of a beautiful stranger?
Do you remember the man on the plane that told you everything and listened while your dreams unfurled, so far away from the world that you truly believed in them?
I have always found memory funny. I find the faces of people in the bottoms of bottles or the bass line of an old song. We often forget that their are people who we love so temporarily that we only see flashes of them when our lives are the most human. When we are sitting in a nostalgic playground, or we lay in the dark, believing we can stare at the stars forever.


We are often wrapped up in the idea of someone loving us eternally. Humans are obsessed with the idea of people holding us for the rest of our lives because it is scary to think somebody cannot contain our chaos for more than several minutes. People often overlook the instances in life that are filled with emotion from a stranger.
Our lives are collections.
Collections of so many words that we’ve forgotten and people who’s faces we can’t recall anymore because we’ve only known them briefly. We are all just instances that have led to the person you are today. I hope you have remembered all of the wonderful strangers that have created you. If you don’t, write them down. Keep a collection of the people that you have loved with your all in just a simple moment. Write out your memories and hold them dearly.
These are my strangers.
Maybe it was you. Maybe, to you, I was them. Here’s to you, here's to us, here’s to all the strangers I have ever loved.

I fell apart.
my art isn’t what I want it to be and I found your shirt in the wash.
i’ve been crying into clean laundry and I keep wondering if you’re feeling a heart break this strong.
I know you’re not.
but god can I pray to the universe that there is some sign of your emotion.
you always thought you were like your father
always leaving and cycling back
again
and again.
i will wash your shirt a million times
but memories don’t clean off.
please don’t coat your feelings in steel
why am I writing this?
why is this the way my brain cycles
around and around and around
why am I the over dramatic poet and you the cold hearted artist?
is art and poetry hand in hand?
or are they as different as the sky and the sea
don’t they meet?
but also stretch aimlessly on and on and on.
you be the sky
and I’ll be the sea.
we will always touch
though we stretch on and on and on.
i’ve been crying into clean laundry
and watching it cycle
again and again and again

I am trying to be a poet
but I felt like your poem.
Am I an artist or
am I the remnants of your paint
splattered on my favorite jeans?
Or the beautiful words you gave me
including "I'm sorry"?
I am trying to be a poet
but the words get spit back in the bottle
and stick with strangers who I have told too much to.
Am I a writer
Or am I just gagging on the words you threw at me
when you smashed the plates
and slammed the door?
I am trying to be a poet.
But I am tired.
Isn't
That
Poetry?

*** is realizing how much you need every part of one person, and then giving it to each other.
My body forms under your hands
and I am sculpted in this very moment.
Created by the fire you blow into me.

We sit on the opposite sides of a solid glass wall. I do not see you breathing but rather hear it the way I heard your hands waving goodbye. You haven’t changed. Its been three months and your sly smile still embodies every plan I had for the future except now you are somebody else’s future and I am still struggling to define the word.
You can not hear me from this side of the glass but it doesn’t matter anyway. Every word I’ve ever said to you has already been said. Every word I say to anybody else is a hollowed echo of things I have described to you, highlighted in love.
Although I can not speak, I trace words over the glass. I wanted to give you every poem in the world but words were never enough and no poetry could make somebody like you love me back. But I will give it all to you, here in this moment. My fingers trace the ghosts of words over the slick cold surface. As soon as my hand leaves, the words float up into the air and suffocate the room with all of the metaphors I have tried to give you.
You stare blankly at me etching my loneliness into thin, nonexistent words. And you start to run your fingers over the glass too. You let your emotions spill out in the form of art. You paint canvases of landscapes that you always wanted to see and dreams that you never truly let go. They spill out of you like tears that you once told me you never knew how to spill. I fall in love all over again with the ability you have to paint the future, which I had always found so bleak. In this one moment, my words and your art spin together in a dance that was always too exhausting for you and not enough for me.
Although our fingerprints do not stick, the wall comes alive with all of the nights I had given to you. Moonlight picnics and warm summer days fill my head like a flood that you had pushed me into and I had gladly drowned in. Now, I spend nights pushing back up but the water will never truly let me out. I watch the beach spin out before me with you pulling me in and waves crashing over us. I remember thinking that we were the smallest things on earth, standing before the limitless ocean. We had been brought too each other.
I stop and push my hand to the glass, hoping that you will push your hand to mine. The whole wall will melt and we will fold back into each other. Every night for the last three months were just a countdown to feeling whole again after becoming so broken, but you continue to draw. I stare deeply into you, hoping to find the artist that painted her portrait on my heart. It doesn’t happen. You continue to draw.
I realize now,
that the glass is a one way mirror.
You cannot see me. I am still floating into visions of you that **** up your last words of “I don’t care about you anymore.” I am still the overdramatic poet you had always know me as.
And none of your art was ever for me.

Imagine a chain
flowing from your heart,
hooked to the center of the universe.
Chains are not light, neither are the stars.
And neither is life.
When your chest feels tight,
and you can't carry your heavy heart any longer, believe that you are made of stardust.
The stars are pulling you back home.

our existence
is placed in such an awkward position.
you never look at yourself,
until other people truly see you.
your mothers gleaming eyes sink your heart,
as you stand with your head held to the kitchen counter.
you suddenly feel like a stranger, in your own home
in such an awkward position.
standing in front of bathroom doors that have lit bombs, wounded many.
you stand suddenly as a criminal
in the middle of an awkward position.
having to correct someone when they use the wrong pronouns and you're heart races and the only thing your existence feels
is awkward.
life in the middle of a political battlefield
is drafting dysphoria between sides of yourself.
but,
someday you will find yourself in the lines of someone else's hands.
beauty is reflected in her eyes when she looks at you.
as we lay curled together,
neck bent, and limbs unendingly tangled,
I have never been happier
in such
awkward positions.

Beauty is subjective.
Art is at the pillar of human sanity.
If men were not able to find beauty in life,
Would we know the meaning of ugly? Or sin?
Beauty is breathing, constantly being undressed in the glow of a lovers light.
It hides but it is constantly visible.
We know the beauty of a flower but not the beauty of a soul?
We were built on the backbone
Of beauty.
We were built with the emotional ability to let our minds wander
In the nirvana that is what we perceive to be beautiful.
Is art not what we create, but what creates us?

time is choking me
I can feel it all around me and I want out
Time is just man made but time is a snake sent by God to wrap and squeeze out your life
No matter how much makeup you put on, the masks you wear, time is all around you
Why won't it let go
Sometimes it squeezes so hard you *****
And your hands are numb but feeling was never important
Because what is feeling to time
You wake up every night because you can't breath,
Time lays beside you, but it never sleeps
Time holds a screen in your face and calls it memory
It's really just a movie that you never really liked anyway
One with him touching you and you touching her, making sure time doesn't let you forget about him like you have
Nobody in this world ends a sentence for you unless you do it yourself so do it yourself
With the knife you hold, you could **** time
I feel so sick
Do doctors have medicines for time because I don't want too anymore, I can't want too, I can't, I don't, I won't
Eventually he's going to quiet my heart, and nobody will hear me

In society,
Women are always told they are too much.
Too angry, too calm
Too quiet, too loud
Too big, too small
And we are all of these things
We are angry.
Angry about the internalized oppression that still flows on a day to day basis. We are angry about our predefined roles of what girl is, what girl should be.
And we are too calm.
Calm about the man that called you a name in the street and all you wanted to do was cry
Or the teacher that told you you couldn't do what you wanted because it was a mans place, not a woman's
You should have yelled, but you didn't. Because we are too calm.
We are too quiet.
We are silenced.
Our opinions are ranked of worthiness by our physical features, our body types. Our intelligence is last to our ****** appeal. We can not be heard through the babble of social media judging and critiquing and pointing out our flaws. So we are quiet.
And we are loud.
We have the ability to speak for the world. To weave the revolution out of the words of women. We have the voice to speak to our sisters globally, teach women that we are loud. We can drown out prejudice with the power of voice and bring down the barrier of how a girl should be.
We are small.
Told that our personalities are preset by the gender normalities that the patriarchy has placed, we are shrunk to fit our predefined roles. They cut us into shapes so we can not realize that we are so much bigger.
Because we are big.
We are huge. We have global impact. While we are cut down, I would like to see us glue each other back together. I want to see women take back our voices. I want to hear women all over the world speak how they feel, bust through the barriers of what the patriarchy has told them. Fight back against their rapists, abusers, silencers. When someone tells you that you are being too much, say "I am. And I am becoming so much more."

A war wages between your head and your body.
You wake up next to your anxiety,
Coating you in a bubble between rationality and fear.
Evil holds your hand every day,
You never noticed him until you were ten years old and they told you about war.
He was the lieutenant.
You never wanted to know him but you found yourself at thirteen,
Looking him in the eye when the kids at school called you names.
Now he walks with you everyday and waves to all the kids he knows.
Evil is the pressure of depression,
The mania of schizophrenia,
The animal that is anorexia.
You hold all of the goodness inside of you.
And all of the evils too.

Our bodies are not temples,
I will not be invaded as such.
We are ecosystems.
Made of grit, blood, and change.
Packed with multitudes of intricacy,
We love like gushing streams.
Wound like thorned bush.
Hurt by humanity like hunted prey.
As we burn, as we are cut down,
As we are wounded, crippled, abused,
We still grow.