My toes are so so cold,
Here, let me press them against your spine.
You screech but you know you love me.

The silence of a night bus,
The artificial glow reveals everything.
We are the ‘ugly’ of this city.

There is a blade pointed at my heart
She’s behind me
I scream his name, I beg for help
He walks away

I am desperate
She is lighter than I expected
Fling her frail body to the ground
Broken christmas ornaments.

Her hand has fallen off
It is clinging to my coat
Stomp, stomp, stomp it out
Run.

He is in the next room.
He waited for me.

I have remembered loving you
In many different ways.

I remembered loving you
As a blade, once.
Those memories made me bleed
They burned, they ached,
No matter how many bandaids I used
They refused to stop.

I remembered loving you
As a bruise.
First, it hurt vaguely all the time
Everyone could see the deep purple
Of my pain.
But gradually, it faded
until it only hurt when I put pressure on it,
Or when someone accidentally bumped it.

Now, I remember loving you
As a thick, deep scar.
I can trace my fingers over it
And it no longer hurts.
I can remember what it felt like,
To love you,
To lose you,
But the blade’s bite is behind me.

It’s taken me so long,
To see my scars as proof
Of healing instead of harm.
But I’m stronger now.

Goodbye, old flame.

I no longer miss you.

My teeth hurt when I eat candy,
But I do it anyways
Because sometimes the hurt
Is worth the sweetness.

I breathe your loving words in deeply
Fill my lungs with your sweetness
And exhale those petty insecurities
That once stained them black.

Your gentle smiles tickle my skin
Your laughter tousles my hair,
Dead leaves swirl upon cold concrete
In the wake of your joy.

But your fury.

It is screaming against my window
Rattling the glass like old bones
It is scraping my skin raw
I cannot speak with such chapped lips.

And the silence after,
My hollow chest still echos your gusts
Your cold front has torn the warmth
From my very bones.

Perhaps,
Next time the wind howls
And the trees shudder
I will just stay inside.

I think I would like
To write the word “love”
On the inside of my forearm,
Over the cracks in my porcelain fraud,
So that the letters might fill the gaps
And color what lies beneath.

I’d like to stain my fingertips with love,
And trail them along every wall,
Over every surface I pass,
So that I never leave anything more
Than the gentlest admiration
In my wake.

I’d like love to tint my eyes
Valentine heart red,
So that I might be blinded to hatred
In all it’s ugly forms,
And instead see only gentleness
In the eyes of strangers.

I’d like to cast my spine in love’s steel,
Because I know **** well
It is anything but soft.
And let it stand me up tall
Let me never be ashamed of it
In any form it comes.

Fill my veins with love,
Pump it through my body
Like ******’s newest form,
So that I can get high on the idea
That everything is made of pure
Beauty.