I live for the pain you bring me. I craved the feeling of being let down by you, because in some way it means we were close enough for you to hurt me.

Little one,

You are resilient, you are compassionate, you are generous, you are brave.

You are so much more than your lovely bright eyes and mischievous smile.

You are hopeful and stubborn. Surprising and curious.

You have too long loved those who thanked you for taking up so little space.

You were made for more.

You are ready for more.

Ask for more.

I think the problem is,
There is not enough of me,
For 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

For absent friends
For each promise broken
For every dream that won’t come true
For the harm I have caused and now regret
For the pain I have inflicted upon you
For love I will handle your sins,
In justice I will show you mine.

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

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

I wish the world were made differently

I wish growth didn’t have to hurt

I wish feeling happiness didn’t rely on knowing sadness

I wish pain were not necessary to know pleasure

I wish I could have learned through love

Not a burden
Not undeserving
Not broken,
A mess to be cleaned up.

So endlessly enough

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.

Endings in real life come suddenly,
Often without warning or making sense

I’ve never liked this

One day you wake up only to realize,
It was all a very long time ago
And we are different people

There is no closure
No neat narrative,
To wrap it all up

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.

To love me is to accept sleepless nights; to accept immortality; to accept that you love what you cannot mend. In other words (which are not my own):

“I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn’t happiness.”

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

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.

I am thankful for each goodbye spoken to me

The most painful are never said,

Never explained

Who I am,
Is so deeply interwoven
With the broken parts of me

I fear if I heal them,
Then I will lose myself

I thought I was done with this pain

And yet,

I am burnt to ashes

Only an elegy could illustrate this ache

You shine,

Like the buckle of Orion’s belt,
Like the intertwined wrists of Castor and Pollux

Two soulless constellations locked within solar flare and interstellar disconnect.

I wonder if you shine because comets trail from your eyes

Or if maybe you are trying to catch the gaze of Orpheus, whose love for Eurydice is dampened by the glow of your smile

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

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.

Is love quantifiable?
Is it about plunging the world into darkness
Ripping the veil that separates us from heaven
And displaying the entirety of the cosmos
That exists for your express enjoyment?

Is love about grand gestures?
Draining the very seas
And telling you it cannot be measured
Endless like the grains of sand

Is love found in the quiet and still?
In the timid motions of a shy heart
Struggling to beat its pain away?

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.

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 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.

I was fun to chase but boring to keep

When they ask why I can't let the notion go,

It's because I want to hate it properly

It is the present no one wants
The unopened package
An uncomfortable silence
In a room full of people

Funny how I have convinced myself
The love I offer so freely
Not wanted,
Not needed

Often times,
I have no words for my emotions
Often times,
I cannot articulate my sadness
And how it consumes me
Entirely

If a tree falls in the woods with no one to hear it, does it still make a sound?

It’s not so much philosophy so much as it is physics but I won’t bore you with the science when I say:

Did you know when you heart trembles,
Cracks,
Fractures,
Breaks in two,
With no one to heal it or love,
It doesn’t make a sound?

Did you know that your sadness,
That so often goes unseen and unheard,
Becomes a poison to your very soul?

Did you know that this silence,
This ambivalence,
This distance between us,
Destroys me?

I think you do.

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

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

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

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.

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?

You spoke of love so effortlessly

But tell me, have you learned that is not the same as being able to give and receive love properly?

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

Dear reader,

Will you sit with me in silence,

When my words no longer work?

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

When you say my name, your voice drips with venom

You cringe at the bitter taste as it rolls off your tongue

When I try to speak your name it becomes heavy in my throat

Stealing away my breath as I churn at the very thought of you

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?

You are still so deeply engraved in my heart
Daggers on every page of this story
I offer flowers of reconciliation
Because that’s what fools do

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

I think a part of you felt
That if you kept hurling stones
Eventually I’d use them to build a wall
And shut you out…