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?

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

I’ve often been told I’m too uptight

Little do they know,

Each day I make a cup of coffee

A display of quiet anarchy,

For it too is an act of entropy

I find myself drawn to you,
Like the tide pulled by the moon
And I wonder if you too are lonely,
Carrying the weight of the night,
Alone

There will always be stories
With one saying to another:
This is what it feels like to me
Can you understand what I am saying?
Does it feel the same to you?

Do you think the moon waits the whole night
Just to see the sun?
To share their stories with each-other
In the few moments they have together?

They were made for each-other
They make the other complete
Two halves of the whole,
Each a part of the others soul

Even when the moon faded away
The sun did not lose its reason to shine

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...

People have always been people

I lived
I loved
I made something
I laughed
I cried

We’re exactly the same

Please do not forget me

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

Let their words break upon you
as waves assault the cliffs
a foundation of bedrock
unbothered by the affairs below
iron-clad in will

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

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.

I can’t convert this pain into something positive.
I refuse to pass it on.  
I grasp at it doggedly,
Like a rock that drags me to the ocean floor.

Dear reader,

Will you sit with me in silence,

When my words no longer work?

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

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

The intimate act of showing the one you love your unfinished art says to them:

“Like my unpolished heart, I trust you with this.”

I bleed
I pen poetry in that blood
I pen prose in that blood
No good without color
Never free from abuse
So relive it all
Weep for the pages
And write it for those who read
For them I bleed
Into the blank spaces I cannot mend
What a waste

Pain had a sort of beauty until it became my own.

Pain was the material which became poetry when it was irrelevant to me.

Now I have pain stored in me that couldn’t be turned into poetry.

There was nothing poetic or beautiful about how I have endured.

Pain that is brutal and poisonous.

Pain that forces me to close my eyes and shut my ears in denial.

Pain that swallows my words and suffocates my silence.

Pain that strangles the ink and turns into blood on my paper.

Love had a sort of beauty until it became my own.

We tend to ruin things
On purpose or not---
Including each other.

You try to find beauty in everyone else, but I wonder if you have tried to find it in yourself. 

You are worth more than the tears that fell from your pained eyes at 3 AM

You are better than the nasty people who may have called you tragic and ugly.

You're better than the people who have laughed at you.

You are drastically better than the hate and sadness that eats at you everyday.

I understand how this hurt, this poison in your soul and how each day is a struggle to overcome it.

It may not mean anything to you right now but when you’re sitting at home old and grey I hope you look back at these days.

That's when you will have finally found out who you are and how strong you’ve become. So I know your world may sometimes cave in and you’re suffocating under the sea of hurt you find yourself in... but sometimes you need to create your own boat and find the high ground.

I hope you find it soon.

It is a language I do not understand

Maybe we’ve met before, spent a lifetime together

An eternity passed under the sun

Isn't it remarkable, the way we can know ourselves by knowing others?

I have picked through my remains

And found pieces of you

I look at you and find myself.

I compare you to an old injury
Like those maimed by war
Or survivors of natural disaster
Something to be endured

I struggle to reconcile the conflict in my heart
Because in both times of war and peace
Heartbreak is the same

My single greatest fear,

Is that this has all been a series of mistakes,

I will never be able to unmake.

For every great artist with a closet full of bad paintings,

There is one with only skeletons.

I can watch you from afar, because it doesn’t burn

You are as foreign to me as the stars

And just like them you have the insolence of setting me on fire when I get too close

Frustrated
Confused
Everything comes to an end?
Too quick
Not enough time

Am I better today than I was yesterday?
Have I learned to be humble?
Do I take care of my thoughts when I am alone?
Do I mind my words when I am with others?

I must destroy the idea,
That I am better than anyone else

Is love made meaningless in impermanence?

No, no more than anything else

Still, the world is awash with reasons not to love

I am not convinced by a single one

I guess the worst thing you could steal is pieces of others lives.

You either hurt them or waste their time.

Definitely the worst thing you could steal is another's time. You just can't get that back and we're so insecure about the whole thing that people are convinced we have all the time in the world.

Still, even when we waste others time it's not as though we've made a clean getaway...that's the problem.

We never just take away from another, we always leave something in it's place. A vague feeling of emptiness. Black paint on a white canvas — nothingness that one can physically see.

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

It robs me of my words,
It is the mirror in which I look,
And no longer recognize what I see.
Who was it we were fighting all along?

Perhaps it was me?

Is forgiveness something that could be mine?
To very notion akin to trespassing,
This luxury which I seek.

Dear Reader,
You once promised
That we would sit in silence
When my words no longer worked.

I must go now.

When we first met how did you describe me?
What did you say?

I could not stop talking about you.
I went on about you like you were the very stars.

Or at the very least,
How they were placed in the heavens for your express enjoyment.

I went on for hours,
about how when you touched me,
I could have melted in your hands.

You had me under a spell,
I would have done anything for you.

For love?
For love I would do anything
I love in the same way the oppressed go to war
It is never in half measures

You have been a teacher
Of passion and guilt
Quiet Rebellion
That resounds now still
And I,
Disobedient,
Followed and learned,
From you,
And of you

It is the baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe.
The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release, the indifferent judge between the high and low.

How can I fight the tide when the deep water held a curse?

It has drowned my every waking thought; but in dreams I soar, breeze-limbed and light.

When I woke, tasting salt, the waves were all about me and darkest night had melted into water’s grave;

But I could not swim, nor move or call out for help.

So I must die a thousand times until I am borne upon the sea that rages within me.

The heart dies twice—

First when we realize the world is neither as kind nor good as we once believed

The second comes when we are incapable of believing it to be either

The first is borne from necessity

The second serves no further purpose than to illustrate tragedy…

I could tell you about how I write poems about you — like clockwork.

How every other one I would bitterly title as the last words I would give to you.

How easily I broke my own promises, and how satisfying it was to make you out as something sweeter than you are.

You wouldn’t want to hear about how caught I was in your eyes, in your laugh; in your smile and the words I always took the wrong way.

How delusional I was, how hopeful, how sad, but maybe that would explain the things I can’t find the voice to say.

I think sometimes we take silence for what it isn’t, because we get confused between what we need to be told and what we want to hear.

So many words unsaid
Places never reached
Memories we wish to erase

I learned to cry silently
To fear making sounds when I walked
So much of me is desperate
Not to disturb the peace
I suppose that’s the child in me

I grew up bitter and calloused
Keeping sharp edges around conversation
Because if I spoke harshly enough,
If I spoke concisely enough,
It would pierce the miasma around me

They told me not to take up space
That my thoughts didn’t matter
And so I learned to keep to myself
It hurt far less than rejection

Wading through the morass of obligation

I tend to the fallow fields of being  

And like a tree from which we gather no flowers

Sad has been this life

Fated to produce no fruit

I bury you in the marrow of my bones

Forever to be carried in this wreckage

A derelict heart full of curses and portents

Salted wounds and blood in the water

Ships arriving on strange shores

Satellites in eternal free fall

Orbiting stars named for blasphemed gods

Their supplicants and shrines

Long since consumed by fire

Or in moorland, drowned and exhumed

A place once called home, become a tomb

Possibly the worst feeling
Is to know you did your best
But even then, it was not enough

So I find myself becoming bitter
You might ask why
For if I were merely sweet,
This pain would have eaten me already

In the end you were only predictable in your unpredictability

I have never stopped writing for you
It has just become sadder over time
Lingering on your every word
Hanging myself on each labored breath
Look at what you’ve done
My captive heart still belongs to you

Come see this menagerie
The traumas and fears which once steered me
Put on display and stored behind glass
Like wild beasts, for you dear reader to see

What is the secret to your rage?

How do you hold your grudge?

What do you tell yourself to commit to your hate?

I sit here and watch how harshly it divides and yet,

Can I learn it too?

How do you expect me to stand on my feet when you keep striking at my ankles?

I wish I had the words
To tell you I miss you
Rather,
I wish I were allowed
Without disturbing your peace

To tell you how much you mean to me,
Without expectation

It is the ancient, absent god, seldom spoken of in hushed whispers among certain literary circles.

Sustained by the fervent prayer of a single solemn supplicant.

Chapped palms raised with the melancholy and mettle of a man who has nothing left to lose.

When the sweet and sublime have passed, I still believe in love as though its existence would cease should I stop.

Sometimes,
I feel like an assortment of people
Who never existed
But wanted to,
All at odds with each-other
Over matters of meaning,
Our purpose in life,
The nature of love.

Each one clamors for my attention