I did not require fixing
Asking only that you do no damage
Here in the rot and rust
I plant my own gardens
And decorate my own soul
Making it my own
Making it my home

You are cigarette butts,
Empty bottles,
And nights spent hunched over the sink.

You are journals bursting at the seams,
Bad poetry,
And long playlists.

You are fingernails bitten down until they bleed,
Smeared eyeliner,
And trauma I never came to understand

You are regrets buried in the closet,
Broken glass,
And I hope you find your peace.

A poem of thankfulness
That you are gone
And have stayed gone

When you like someone for what they represent perhaps they’re better left as an idea.

Some people destroy the things they touch
Just to prove they can break

Art is our savior
Revealing which lessons lie
Where pain resides
Turning salt to sugar.

Boundaries as suggestions
Like lines drawn in the sand
Washed away by the tide
They mean nothing in the end

How easy,
To rip the unsewn stitch
Or tear the thread of an untold tale.
Often these tapestries,
Tattered and stained with red,
Have experienced one reign after another.

Not evil, perhaps something lower?
An abyss of a person—a counterfeit soul.

Once upon a time she said,

“That’s why I didn’t want to get close, I knew I’d be messy for you.”
…

I met someone,
And you’re so different.
She’s so different,
From you I mean.

In that I don’t have to ask,
I don’t have to beg.
Not a secret shame,
Not something on the side.

It wasn’t until it came so easily that I realized how poorly you treated,
Me.

How do I tell her that I’m terrified she’ll treat me like you did?

How do I explain that when I seem distant,
Detached,
A thousand miles away,
It’s because your barbed wire words strangle my heart?

Threads so perfectly entangled,
Only the sharpest of instruments could separate.
Even had we been careful or courteous,
surely it would have nicked our hearts.

You strip your sleeve and show your scars,
“These are from every battle I avoided.”

I can’t find what it is you despise,
For me,
It’s that you wasted my time.

Maybe it’s your self aggrandizing behavior,
Or the downward spiral into an elegy
Which I cannot stop myself from revisiting.
They say,

“He speaks of you as though you were dead”

In this lies a modicum of truth
Silent witching hours where my dreams are haunted.

The still, dead of night gripping me in terror
As I am unable to determine where the chains that bind me end, and the ones you carry begin.
Skulking through the corridor of my mind like Marley’s specter.

How has it come to pass that the line between elegy and ghost story is blurred in such a manner?

I made room
I made time
In an effort for connection

I make reason
You make rhyme
I make nothing but exceptions

We made a fool out of me
A hero out of you
You're nothing but perfection

I make excuses
We make lies
It's nothing but deception
And we are sinking
                        sinking...

Through pit and prosperity,
All is well.

Do you come here to love me?
All of me and that which consumes me?
To embrace both darkness and light?
I attribute it all to some horrific cosmic disservice…
Surely the only reason to warrant it.
For it is not enough that my heart aches,
And my body riddled by anguish each day.
Emotional dissent called debt by my creditor,
I am compelled to pay.
Truthfully I would tell you to run,
For such is the heartache that dwells within me.

In quantity you were short-lived in my life, though quality wise as grand as any person could ever hope for.

I enjoyed each moment of your laughter, the command of your beauty, and the reach of your personality that taught me to want more for myself.

I hope the world lives up to your every expectation.

I try to untangle the parts of me that once cared

The remaining fragments like crumbs
Like drops of dew resting after the morning rain
The last beam of light as the setting sun flees.

Sometimes painful but seldom peaceful

I adore broken things.
Because even roses come to be without thorns,
if not to be just as beautiful
to smell just as sweet.

Hearts chained to glory,
Gladiators and their stories.
Am I bad person?
It depends on who you ask.

No one is obligated to forgive you.
I am not obligated to forgive you.
We can learn from our mistakes,
Become the kindest person on Earth,
And the people we've hurt still won't forgive us.
Learn to accept that.
We still continue to grow because we're neither good nor pure,
We're complicated.

Forgive me Father, for I have sinned—
I have fancied myself a god
Whose only transgression is hubris.
That like Him, I can create something beautiful,
And make it immortal through word alone.

To be seen differently by every person who walks across the work that now holds you in it.

To be seen as something that brings creation.

To be seen.

That is why you hate it.

I have been hurt so many times that it is no longer enough that you tell me of your love.

You must show me.

When I was young
I took on so much
That was never mine to carry.

Though I can set it down at any time,
I'm not sure how...

Knowing you is a tragedy
Familiarity a stake in the heart
Absence a cup of tea gone cold
To everything clings a sense of “after.”
When I awake it is in this after,
A distant place where I do not know you.
It is peaceful.

I try and reconcile my need to create through art and my desire to leave no remains or memory.

I refuse to be known and recognized.

Forget me once I'm out of your sight.

I do not forgive you.

My blood is still boiling.

I’ll never get closure,

You’ll never set me free

You have left me with paranoia,

That I can never escape.

I forgive you for taking so much
And giving so little
How many people must you be,
Before you become yourself?

I do not fear intimacy
I fear being ripped open and found lacking
I fear the damage you might inflict,
And the damage you will find.

Deplete me
Bind me
Break me
Wash me away like the tide,
Dragged by irresistible force.

Messy people
Write about it what you must
Then walk away

Your ironclad promises
You make and swiftly break
Pleading that I believe in you
Things I don’t give—
You take

Whatever you might throw at me
I’ll clear the way or catch
On occasion I might even respond
By throwing something back

Who am I in other peoples stories?
Am I the ripped out page?
The crumpled drawing?
Thrown away after it didn’t turn out right.

To me, I keep the melancholy chapters
And leaf through the bittersweet and loss
Looking for the substance or lesson
Hidden between the rot and the rust.

A sad ending doesn’t make it unworthy of reading.

There were times before music
Times were times before laughter
There were times before hope

But there were still sunsets

What I mean to say is
Even when life resembles the dead of winter
When empathy and love have fled
The rosemary and sage will come back
And there will still be sunsets.

I want to be loved in my darkness
To be loved when I am bruised
When I can no longer find it in me to love myself
Then too I want to be loved.

The sympathetic villain is passionate; even they feel pain.

Not evil, perhaps something lower?
An abyss of a person—a counterfeit soul.  

Calling to memory the despair of a black hole.

You destroy, you rot, you steal the light.
You feel nothing and let nothing in.

And you infect me, too, when I know I must share my existence with you.

Lie to me,
Tell me that I am alive
Tell me that I am free

Is it bitter?
Is it sweet?
Does it taste of holy wine,
or the blood which stains our hands?

I wait for the day when a flinch no longer follows your name. When the memory burned into my being is kinder than you ever were.

To be free of the silence which suffocates and tears shed through clenched teeth.

So simple yet unknown
You weave stories
And try them on for size

You’ll seek a new story
Sculpt it with stars
Until you exit this plane
And its careless derision

Breaking all doubt
‘Til it’s born anew
Hooks in my heart
Howling in tune

You will always return
Bigger than before

Tear it down brick by brick
Quickly before the ground caves in
Convince yourself it’s a chemical reaction
Manipulate each corner of your brain
Until it lacks passion

Wading through shared history like a still sea
Ever searching for lies coated with honey,
Promising righteous love
Feigned Fantasies

To be looked at with love
To be spoken to with honey
I’ve never known this

Healing began when I stopped allowing what was left of my heart to be destroyed by the very things that had broken me.

Some names will always feel like a sin, dripping from our lips.

In the cold I have waited
For you to draw near
To once more feel your warmth  

If winter promises to give way
I shall endure my thirst
As I search for spring

We are meant to be loved as wholes not just as the pieces others adore
We are meant to be loved completely
We are meant to love with forgiveness and grace

Love is the closest to the divine we will ever find

(On a more personal note I had archived most of my writing during a bout of depression and general ambivalence towards life. In a way hiding them away was like hiding a part of myself. I decided to bring them back in the hopes you all will  enjoy them as much as I loved writing them)

The ordeal of trust is mortifying
but I still give myself away within my words,
laying my heart bare
hoping it will be held gently