We cling to loss
Not because we want them back
But because we drown in the emptiness
That comes with it.

We are not one breed – but we are all reaching; all trying to dash out our insides in an effort to find something we never knew was there.

I find I’m tired of life and I’m tired of not living, but I can’t stop breathing any more than I can stop writing.

Never love a writer, because though most of us will not be remembered centuries from now, all of us leave something.

They say that the world was built for lovers but we’re the ones cast to keep note.

You’re no longer here,
But I still write you all these poems
A heartbreaker that breaks their own heart
Is that too a form of art?
Laid bare for your dissection,
Do you gain any form of satisfaction,
As to why I have never offered objection?
It too is a chain

I’ve been told each bad poem
Lays the foundation for the next
Each satisfactory one
Tracing its genealogy
Through myriad failures

It surprises me
I do not miss many people

Not in my heart,
Where the feeling swells
Like a delicate bloom
Rushing to fill the space
Between my skin

It has taken me so long
To abandon ambivalence
Walls streaked red
Which I have constructed around them

The way they look at me
Like they were truly listening
How they spoke to me
Without assumption

I’ve changed
Relearning the rhythm of my breaths
And perhaps some day you will take my balance
For I will show you a path
That we can walk together in silence

When your roots are shallow
The slightest breeze
Can blow you away

Evacuate (verb) : remove (someone) from a place of danger to a safe place. To feel safer in the center of a hurricane than I do here. Safer when I step back into a body which I no longer fit in.  Cramped inside a small place which I no longer call home. My safe place has been completely stripped. Reconstructed to fit a person who never existed. Forcing myself to be a piece in the wrong puzzle. I simply to do not fit. No matter how much I shove and twist. I do not belong here. Each attempt always wrong.

“Some day I will write poems about this but first I must survive it.”

Give yourself permission to survive.

This is how art is made.

In the same way Van Gogh painted his Starry Night from the window of an asylum—

It was the safety of the cell,
And not his insanity,
That lifted the brush.

Never apologize for your art.

Treat my heart like your home
Decorate its walls
Invite your friends
Make it yours like I long for it to be

Can you comprehend the language of my pain?
The pain which I cause,
In my ignorance and shame.

My apologies are spoken,
To mend the space
Between who I am and where I am broken,
In damaged bonds I cannot replace.

You will never be new again

When I can’t find you on the pages I live between, I’ll scrawl you across my own.

You’ll find yourself a decade from now scattered across syllables and syntax you never laid hands on.

I can’t go looking for something to save me,

So instead I spend my time thinking about how the bare branches of trees are the most beautiful and how crooked limbs, asleep, are the same.

I assumed there is poetry
In death and the wilting of flowers
In the setting of the sun
In a life with or without words to describe

I assume there is art
Not just in the portraits we burn
But in the dark and hollow nights
Determined to find beauty in the black and grey and white.

I assume there too is music
In the pouring of clouds
In footsteps
In the abandoned and lost

Don’t disappear
Without coming back
Once more whisper to me soft things
Stay to see how proud of you I might be
If you told me everything
And how incapable I am of being upset with you

What do you do when you lose a soul mate?

Not necessarily the romantic type but the judgement-free, kindred spirit.

The one whose soul seemed to understand the fabric mine was made from. That whatever hand knit the fabric of your existence and whichever thread was used to weave your destiny in the world, perhaps brushed against the thread used to stitch mine together.  

I thought that I was yours,
And you mine.

Our threads so perfectly entangled,
That only the sharpest of instruments could separate. And even if we had been careful or courteous, surely it would have nicked our hearts.

Perhaps there exists no thread of life or fate strong enough to stitch us back together.

What would you have me do then?
Which groups exists to support those like us? Are songs written for those like us?

We were not broken up with or cheated on even though it has left us feeling broken and cheated.

What reparations should I make when something has been irreversibly damaged? Who will be left to clean up these pieces?

Who would write a tragedy like this?

My heart has become timid
So quiet,
You might mistake its hush for a silent pool
Whose water lies still
And depth deceives those who stare too long
Into believing it shallow
Shunning the height of emotion
Lest it drown in the undertow
I struggle to stay afloat,
Forgive me

I think of you often and I don't reprimand myself over it anymore. I've convinced myself that I occupy your thoughts just as much you occupy mine. That you too miss the friend you once had. That, like me, you know how inelegant and stupid our untangling was. Perhaps this is the only form of communication we have left.

Each person I have ever met
Has added to the tapestry of my soul
Some adding a single string
To the complexity of the whole

Sometimes strings lie in disarray
Their edges frayed at threads end,
The ghosts of my memories left behind
Woven into the fabric of my being  

To move forward
I face the torn edges of the past
And make peace with the imperfections
Added from each thread,
By integrating them into myself

Do the stars weep for me?
Will the stars find me ruthless and calculated,
As so many jilted lovers?

Will they find me insatiable,
Like those I have taken, had, and refused?
Will they call me cruel?
For melodic tunes played on tugged heartstrings?

Will the stars weep for me?
My wretched form and bruised heart,
Beating like so many others
Under an unforgiving spotlight

I am the Patron Saint of Lost Causes
Each time I let another set of teeth rip me open
(Again and Again)
****** maws and rotting flesh
Just so I can make poetry of it all.

The people I love are vultures
While I,
Some dead thing in a field—
No one cares what killed me
They are just here to take what is left.

(I don’t recognize love unless it eats me alive)

Isn’t love a kind of violence?
If we choose it, then it’s power.
(Again and Again)
Teeth marks around my neck.
This is power.

A hand in my chest,
Eyes hungry
For those I’ve lost,
I bled myself dry for you.

Regret?
We were not well acquainted until just recently
I sit with regret and we speak,
Of wants and wishes,
Of too little, too late.

Mostly we sit in silence,
Because you did not meet the best version of me

I revel in the ways it haunts me,
revere the phantoms and fables
burned into my soul.

I make love to memory, in starless witching hours, when I am too cold, too quiet, too empty

Likewise, weeds splitting once-opulent walls, the dullness of rusted jewels— the primal truth in the certainty of loss.

I want to be enough
To be bright enough
To burn hot enough

To make only acceptable errors
Nothing more

Would I be enough
Were my wit sharper
And my thoughts less scattered

Would I feel your smile upon me then?

They loomed as gods when I was young
Tasked with shaping malleable clay
Instead of love, teaching pain
A childhood home never safe
Unhealed wounds festering for years
Distrusting myself and plagued by fear
Replayed scenes inside my mind
Apologizes I’d never receive
Inside my damaged heart
The place they haunt
Broken

I don’t write for you
I don’t even write for me
It’s to make sense of the chaos
To greet each terror by name

I want to paint a neat narrative
Give it substance and form
Curse it with the burden of a name
Maybe then, it will make sense

It’s easy to convey pain
Difficult to transform it into art—

Here is how I hold the pen
Here is how the pen holds me
Here are my thoughts,
Over-steeped in empty fervor  
Here is everything and nothing

I look forward to a time when cracks in the brittle bones of old age will hurt more than the fissures of a broken heart ever did. Only then will I know I’ve lived.