There is something so wrong
About a crush. An invasion of privacy,
They never asked to be trapped inside
My skull,
Their name rolling silently on my tongue.

i walk down the earth,
barefoot,
feeling the old souls of grasses long
cut to dust
the sunshine like wine against my lips
honey on the skin that still hasn’t forgotten
your fingerprints
the outline of my feet stand tired in the dirt, wandering aimlessly
searching for something to drink to
fill up the gaps in my bones
am i home?
i think the answer is yes, since the sky here is
bluer than your eyes
and the dirt yields to my toes

She says the best thing I can do is have a
Safe space
A place that is just my own, a
Slot in the world where I fit
Safe and cozy like my favorite book,
Reading it until it fell apart.
The best part of the story was when he (all the characters always the same)
Doesn't give up and finds his forever friends, forever home.
I always wanted a forever home,
A place to be me.
The old She said the best thing I can do is
Stop the negative thought cycle.
Okay, let me flip that switch to off,
You know, I don't pay you to state
The obvious, or tell me impossible things.
I left Her.
The new She says to
Have a plan. Hard to do when your life
Is hurtling in 12 thousand directions,
Brains plastered against skulls and walls from the velocity,
Gasping for breath, panic attacks,
Need sleep, need food, neither look good -
But I digress. She says to stop making excuses
And to stop apologizing,
As if I could not express my sympathy to those
Who have to deal with it.
I'm sorry- sorry - not sorry.
And yet...
Some mornings I wake up and it feels so
Good
To not be who I have become.
I, like a miser, hoard the moments that don't
Hurt so much,
Moments of him, moments of me.
Strange, isn't it?
It aches deep down to be me, but I wouldn't
Be anyone else in the universe
I guess that's just life...
She smiles when I tell Her I'm doing okay
It scares me, like She sees that I'm actually
Drowning
In sorrow, in between my breaths
She says to take lots of walks, and I agree,
For once liking the cold bite of November on my face.
My birthday month is awfully dreary, but She seems
To like this time of year,
She says it is good for cleansing the soul,
Not sure I believe Her
She says to trust Her
Not sure I believe Her....

My heart drowns in the depths of
Hopelessness
When your eyes won't meet mine anymore
Because the blue has turned
Sour,
Summer blueberries rotting under
Sunny skies.

I have a love/hate relationship with morning,
And not for the reason you might think;
No, I have no problem with alarm clocks
Or early jobs, cold breakfasts,
Or the grogginess only cleared by a cup (or three) of coffee.
No, I have a problem with literally waking up.
On days I wake up without an alarm clock,
I hate it. Well, hate is too strong a word;
Really, it's bittersweet.
I swim up towards consciousness
From the warm depths of sleep.
I float on the strange, ever shifting barrier of
The dreamworld,
A silver sea rippling with black and white reflections,
Hints of rainbow.
My brain is trying to tell me something,
I'm sure of it, if only I could
See the message for a bit longer.
There is one moment,
One single, tiny, brief, glorious
Moment
Where I know that I'm dreaming.
My dream-self is warm and fuzzy and
Right in the midst of an imaginary...something,
And I know that this instant is all I have left of it.
I strain, focusing all of my real-or-not energy
On decoding whatever it is that I can't quite see.
I revel in the mysterious firing of synapses deep down
Within my brain, forcing pictures of
Life
Onto eyelids that have never seen
The bright-hued portraits
I hang before them.
And I won't be able to think about it
Until that last, final instant,
I try to keep it with me like water in a seive,
But I cannot stop myself from floating up,
Out of Dreamworld, off the surface of the pool,
Away from, from..from....
It's gone.
I can't picture it anymore as I am
Inexorably dragged up towards my life.
I wake, eyes flashing open.
Heart pounding.
Out of breath from my struggle to
See the other side.
A tear escapes from the prison of lashes.
****. I was so close this time...

In my head, she and I were a symphony - red and white
Harmonies sprouting from shoulders rubbing
Hands brushing like strangers on a subway and
Eyes staring too long,
Like looking at the moon when I’ve had too much to drink

I hoped that she would kiss me, so she could read on my lips all the things I
Could not say

But she isn’t really a woman of the kind I can kiss, or so I've been told
Because what’s under her dress doesn’t match the name she introduces herself by
But I want to love her like a woman. Not a confused boy or a ******* or an ‘it’ of the type muttered about by the football team in the cafeteria.

I want to love her like a woman. A woman like my mother or my best friend or Jennifer Lawrence
Like the woman she is.

She asked me to do her makeup and help her find a dress
She had never worn a dress before.
The mirror finally reflected what she felt inside she thanked me for making her
“A real woman.”
It broke my heart, because she was a real woman since…forever.

I've written my suicide note too many times
On the inside of my lips,
Wishing against hope for the rain that pours from iron clouds to
Rinse me away.
I read it, my tongue tracing it's own scars against the warm whisper
Of rose-pink crinkled lines in my mouth
Give up, it murmurs
You've done so much,
Give up
Sleep quietly in the deep waters that are already
Lapping over your eyelashes.
I tear my notes to shreds with the hard, sharp lines of new letters
Rewriting my past and present in the hopes of forcing some peace into my future,
So here is my note
A poem to soothe your inevitable tears.
My thoughts swirl like dark water ****** down a drain,
But thoughts are only wisps of cloud,
Not solid guarantees or promises,
Like the ones I break without you ever knowing.
I need a guarantee, a promise of oblivion, bringing myself to
Be washed down to drain with my thoughts.
I wanted to write a poem to tell you how I
Would die,
To share with anyone the last moments of flickering electricity
In a brain worn out with life
Even though I've hardly lived.
I wanted to write this poem to tell you how much I would leave behind,
How much I would miss the feeling of spring rain on my eyelashes
And hot tea in my throat in October
And your hand on my shoulder when I cried.
I wanted to write you this poem,
But I can't find the words to describe
What a souls looks like
When I open the cage of my lips,
Baring my collections of old, written over notes for the last time.
I wanted to write you this poem,
But I haven't found the words yet
To tell you what death feels like.

My heart curdles, blackened
By cruel whispers. I try to be me, but
I clipped my wings years ago;
No hope of vibrant feathers
Re-emerging from raw and bloodied skin.
But you! My fluttering hope, how I
Wish
I could keep you in a cage of
Tarnished silver in my chest,
Your gossamer wings pinned to my
Struggling heart.

I open my ribs, cold air breathing on
My gasping lungs, feeble heart
And I give you back your rainbow feathers
For without them you pine and crumble.
Wrench open the delicate silver gate
And be free, your healed wings yanking
Ribbons of red from my love.

The steel shovel bites through cold dust,
Rain dripping softly into
A pit of despair
Surrounded by a sea of black coats.
Red roses drop gently down into
The half-inch of mud at the bottom,
Onto the wooden box that looks warm
Even in the October wind,
Containing all the memories of a lifetime.
A small girl crouches by the
Grave
Of her father,
Too young to sense the
Space left by a life.

Slipping, I slide down the edge of cliffs into
A sea dark with hidden pasts and shame
Gasping for air.
I slipped the way a knife goes too quickly through skin,
The way a noose falls too gently around an innocent neck,
The way I need too little pressure to press the trigger.
I slipped like miscarried dreams drip from veins.
It has been almost two years since the last capital-I Incident,
Years scattered with mistakes easily hidden in the crook of a finger or
Under bracelets,
But now I run the risk of slipping below that dark water
And not being able to find my way out.

Time drips slowly down kitchen walls
Like thick strawberry jam left to cook too long on the stove,
Boiling over.
Silence that isn't really silence reigns the gaps between each whisper of breath and tick of the clock and soft roar of raindrops on the street,
Heavy silence pressing  on my shoulders,
Grey like the clouds, smooth and supple
As bare skin at midnight,
Rich, like good chocolate that leaves a sharp aftertaste.
Kitchen walls, soaked in summer memories, green like summer foliage,
Air trapped in damp and warm confusion inside windows streaked with rain,
Eyes that stare too long before glancing away too quickly.
Watching.
Waiting for two hearts to
Acknowledge
Each other.

A backwards world
Where teardrops fall
On petals unfurled;
Live your life behind a wall.

Don't show the pain,
Just follow the crowd
The drip-drop of rain,
Silent screaming so loud.

Strangers give kisses
While friends hand you knives;
What you don't know you can't miss;
Our thousands of lies.

Hiding the shame
Behind perfect expressions,
Falling from fame
Into depression.

Everyone walking around
With these secrets inside,
Fall to the ground
And a part of you died.

Waves roll in and out and
I drift on the tide,
A stirring corpse that has been
Exhausted by your love.
You kiss and touch and care,
Yet all the while a fortress is growing around your
Heart,
To keep me safe from secrets that can't be shared
To anyone,
Lest the spider-web strings
Of relationships
Should tear.
I am bird in a golden cage,
Whose bars are plenty
Far enough apart to let me
Slip through,
Yet I am content to sing
In my self-enforced captivity
So That our kingdom can become a fairytale.
Yet I have tumbled from my perch and
Landed in the real world,
Slumping on ***** sidewalks and in cluttered homes.
What do I have to do to keep myself
From blowing away on the wind
While you turn to a zombie in front of a screen
Covered in games full of fantasy and giants?
I am lost, wandering in a maze of confusion and first love,
And you are not there to save me.

A life's worth of stress, please claim.
Reward: my thanks.

i lost the moon
trying
to count the stars away

Whoever my future lover is,
Know that I will not like you.
At all.
Never ever never
Ever.
I will never like you.
Like is so bland of a word as to simply disappear in
What will be the splendor of
Shared lives and hearts.
I don't care about the words used
To define our relationship, all
I want is to know you.
I want to share our secrets at 3 am over a crackly phone connection,
When only whispered "I love you"s hold together our
Vulnerable hearts as one.
I want to memorize how your eyes
Crinkle up when you laugh and I need you
To see the way my lips turn down and my eyes go dark when I'm not looking at you
And when my heart goes
Thump-thump-thump in the middle of the night
I want your cool hand on my forehead.
I want us to lay together in a dim hotel room and
Kiss quietly as we shyly reveal our worries and shame to each other.
I need you to be gentle, not because it's my
First time but because I'm not sure I'm ready to be loved and
I need you to find the hope in my skin when you trace my scars and
I want to hold you close and tell you how much you save me.
Let your hands wander and
I will answer your gaze with a mouth parted in an
Itch to fit my lips to yours.
Whisper your moans that I know come from your heart when I send
My soul drifting over your hips.
Let me love you
Let yourself love me
Coupled by shared heartstrings on a summer night, watching the moon.
Whoever my partner is,
I will not like you.
I want to find traces of your heart in your collarbones and
Search out your soul between your ribs and
Kiss you like your lips are the oxygen keeping me alive even as we gasp for air and
We will be each a temple for each other's hands to worship
And we will love deeper than our
Skin pressed together and
We will live fuller than pounding hearts and bodies twined together and
We will love more than the sun and the moon together
Just because we can.

If only you could read minds,
Then I wouldn't have to carve my love
On the air between my lips,
Droplets of secrecy and blush that,
Once gone,
Can't ever come back.

Anyone else notice how our news
Is full of death and pain?
5 murdered, 4 in prison,
3 dead in accident, 2 missing,
1 heartbroken.
I'm waiting for the
Day when I can see something other than blood and grief on
The screen in front of me.
Show me a heart.
Show me a soul.
Show me love and life and joy and
Laughter.
I don't need proof that the world can be ugly,
Only that it can be beautiful.

She hated herself.
Her friends all told her how beautiful and talented and wonderful she was,
And she said thanks,
Mirrors rising behind her eyes so they only saw what they wanted to,
Not the poisonous
Self-loathing boiling beneath the skin
She sliced open in secret, in bedrooms and bathrooms,
To let out her fear.
Her darkness was so close to the surface if
If it was a snake it would have bitten them,
The way the razor blades bit into soft hips the she thought were too ugly
And into her tongue, to stop her from
Spilling all her painful truths.
Open-handed words ***** slapping hitting her head
Against the wall of her daddy's office
She hid that mental bruise with fake smiles for weeks as it faded,
Like her scars faded to be replaced with new ones,
Like her heart faded until she was just going through the motions.
If someone had bothered to research the skeletons in her closet
Maybe her mother's scream wouldn't have ripped through an octave and a half in shock when she found her daughter
Hanging like a forgotten Halloween decoration in the back bedroom.
She left a hole in her sister's heart the size of her smile and
Her grandfather couldn't talk except to mutter "What a waste!" and
She broke her best friend down to dust, not knowing that he cried his strength away at her funeral and his tears fell on her casket.
The air in the church is full of echoed voices, hushed
"She was beautiful"
"I loved her"
"Why?"
Maybe if the voices had never believed her lies,
She would still be alive.

I like you.
A lot.
Like, really a lot.
Like, when I look at you, I get
Tiny purple butterflies in my stomach,
And when you smile I smile too.
I'm acting like I'm in grade school,
Trying to sit next to you so I can
Surreptitiously lean against your shoulder,
Secretly hoping you'll notice me and
Maybe, just maybe,
Think of me as more than a friend.
I know I'm being rather obvious
But my heart refuses to sleep quietly,
Preferring instead to conjure up 1 AM dreams
Of your soft curves and loud laughter.
You know, my friends told me to act
When the time was right -
Well, I'm a terrible judge of timing,
I'm always too clumsy
I stumble over half-hopes and emotions.
I can only hope for you to see all the mess in my heart
You probably (I hope) know all this;
I've been told I'm an open book.

Sobs echo
Through warm thick air,
Tears falling on
Tangled ****** locks of hair.
She curls in a corner
Beneath the stairs,
Alone and cold
With an awful story to share.
She has never ever said
That life was even a little bit fair
Because for her whole life,
No one has been there to care.
Nobody helped her repair
Her mind when her senses
Became hopelessly ensnared
In the lies he told her,
The oaths her made her swear.
And she hadn't a friend to make her
See danger when she was unaware.
He grinned his drunken smile
As he sat in a chair
Made of her tears
And her worries and prayers
Because in her life,
There is nobody there.

She writes of the falling days -  
Rumble, tumble, bump down rock slides and
Stutter limbs along cliff edges -
Knows them well, like the back of her
Tiny, fragile hand - too young and too old all at once.
What is there to stop a small girl from
Climbing a mountain to the sun?
oh...
   wait - you could stop her (you did),
with a heart just as stony as her
Mother's diamond wedding ring
You took her and ravaged her mind like
A lover - lacking in love.
How many times have her hands  opened and closed - like
Flower petals, prayer books, lips, legs.
Opened and closed, forever
seeking, searching for another path up the
Mountain.

Pen glides on paper,
As smooth as black ribbons
Draped across the snow,
Or black thread
Stitching up white silk.
The lines of words
Imprint themselves into my brain.
I breathe language,
Feel my heart beat with songs,
Dream in the rythm
Of poetry.
Eventually, the
Ink
Forces its way into my veins,
Carried throughout my body
So that I bleed
Ebony rain.
It infiltrates me
Until I am crying
Midnight tears.
My hearts pumps the
Unformed phrases around and
Around again
Until I dissolve,
Becoming a mirror of darkness
On the floor
To inspire another writer.
'Tis the fate of the poet:
To become one
With one's work
And dreams
And life
And soul.