I'm drowning.
Check back later.

I get back up, every time. I get back up.
So maybe I don't get back up the same. So maybe I'm a little lost
And a little bruised and a little fed up.
I get back up. And I let you look down on me and belittle me,
For staring you hard in the eyes and panting as I hoist my weight off my knees and elbows, and rise back up to spit at your feet.

I let you see my tears and my pleas and my need, so maybe it's not your fault if you've forgotten
All the times I've gotten back up from having fallen,
And I do it on my own all the time.
I don't feel sorry for how many times I've grabbed a shovel. I feel sorry you haven't seen all the things I've buried and gotten on top of, when I've used the shovel to dig myself out instead of hitting rock bottom.
What it is, is a pity you forgot everything that made me strong.

Because I will keep rising, long after you're gone.

Lord,
don't let my feelings take me down sober
It's late at night, and everything's over
Disconnect, and let's have it over-

What's the use in telling you how to be my friend
I remember saying silly things, like this won't ever
end
Now I'm sure we'll each hear it all the time but right now

I gotta just let it out

So I swallow pride like an overdue book
I bet I bought every line, hooked
But this is how it'll be-
Sorry

I don't need to hear the words, they don't change
Signal's down, went out of range, and I
Got the skid marks to prove it
But I wish you'd try to say them anyway, ****

When the rain falls down it makes a pretty mist
With everyone we've kissed, could you even miss
Well I'm sure the next one will at least remember my lips-
Until the next one

So I tell all my friends I'm testing around
Shooting game, jobs and boys and doctors
Who won't remember my name
Well, if it's all the same-

I'd rather you dropped me like a stone,
I'm skipping here, and I'm all alone
But I've grown fond of the lake and I've made it mine
Come on in, the water's fine!

But maybe I'm not-

Lord,
don't let my feelings take me down sober
It's late at night, and everything's over
Disconnect, and let it be over

I let the sticky fingered kids grab me
Collected forced fingers like candy
Again turned away from the bottle,
Trying to leave this me and us behind full throttle-

I'll be a social butterfly in the house of a lepidopterist
Be another number on a manager's list
Talk to someone I pay to hear me instead of you
God I hope I do as well as you

Hiding out my pain somewhere else
Because it's not easy trying not to be myself
Until I wash it all away with pain and time
Well, my worries shouldn't be yours.

They aren't even mine

Why don't I tell you everything? Or how about how I'm feeling?
I don't share that much with my friends, of course.
If you want more, you open your door more!
Men.

Lord don't let my feelings take me down sober
I'm chill as ****, so now this sad poem's over
It's behind me now,
I feel a lot older.

She was a girl who listened to music boxes and dreamed of ships, stars, old country lanes. A girl who kissed gin and twisted ponytails in and out while studying her pupils with the lightswitch up, down, up, just as erratically as with her hair as her teeth set on edge trying to think of unfathomable words. Melodies whose names simply did not exist no matter how she tried to pin them down and press them for perfume.

She didn’t belong to the recently cleaned room she called hers, the term home not resonating. The house in Canada, not home. The house in Duncanville, TX, not home. Not the estate in her favorite book, no house belonging to a friend, no dream limbo, no college. Tormented by the feeling there was something there, in her reach but slipping out like oil. It felt like having a long distance affair with someone who, through lack of proper documentation in any census, simply did not exist. The pained, intimate knowledge of the characters in her head, of the places she’d only researched. If she opened her eyes a little wider, turned her head to a shadow quicker, took a side road, they’d be there. She’d forget why she ever doubted, and then, accompanied by the slow setting relief that she belonged somewhere, she’d smile easy and drop the stitch in her forehead. Somehow she supposed it was the same for everyone.

Everyone must be incredibly lonely, she thought. Driving the slow, dingy roads home. The balance between dry painful eyes and the darkness folded around the coarse street lamps found comfort contingent on perception. The familiar 40-minute crawl from town to town to home was wearing her gentleness thin.

So she lifted the newly washed sheets and took one last gaze out at the street lamps and glass for the day. Her heart had no place in it.