Sometimes I wander to my broken heart, though,
I whisper the names which used to make it sing,
I take it out to the Ocean
And cast a line out to find the missing pieces
But what I told you, the truth is,
I wouldn't want them back
Because then I'd miss this,
These fishing trips.

These days I've been drinking ***** like water,
Trying to laugh a little harder,
To drown out the world

My cells are renewing all the time,
You've never touched this new skin of mine
Yet I feel your touch on me all the same
My old cells can't die fast enough
One day my mind will deteriorate
To where I won't remember my own name
But I will still remember I'm missing someone-

It's all the same

Once I was a lark, you freed me from my cage
You brought me to the moonlight, I could breathe again
In your eyes I bathed in the moonlight,
In my eyes you did the same
In your love I was saved,
But was caged all the same

It's like being stuck in a cave,
I want to find the light and claw my way out
But sometimes I wind up deeper than before
I don't want to lose my family, found or otherwise, nor my lover
But oh, did I mention the cave is underwater?
I only ever wanted to be a perfect daughter.

Still, I remember when you entertained the idea
Of shipping off with me
I remember the passion in your eyes,
The assurance that we could do anything, just be
But what we’ve become, is everything I’ve been running
From.
And now, no matter what I desire, I have seen the darkness I’ve cast over you
The way you shy from my touch, that I should have known better
Why didn’t your father ever teach you not to play with fire?

Eclectic songs from foreign lands, spiritual and wild
Are his voice,
And he is nature and attention with behavior as the river flows,
He loves as a buck and carves as a woodsman,
A home and a hearth to heat.

His eyes betray the ghost of eyes I knew before,
But I do not know their story, only
That it puts me at ease in his front seat.

Exhilaration in the act of climbing again,
In sitting on the riverbed naked, fed grapes by artful fingers.
Wonder in the sunbeams shifting through the trees
Awe in the act of a kiss, and
Comfort in a beer and a drag and the warmth he has
to offer.

Were I the primordial force I would claim to be,
I would take his hand and bid him to come away with me
To live in the woods and love by the water.

Pretty soon I was crying into a cup of tea, drinking in the lightening flashes, waiting for the sudden onslaught then drought of rain
Whispering to her, hushing her ramblings
I didn't even realize I was alone again.

Pretty in pictures we send,
People we'll never see in person
Pretty words we don't say in person
A fantasy, a guile, and as immaterial as a dream
Pretty, pretty words, I've heard so oft before...
"I won't leave" "I'm not like that" "you're not annoying"
"It won't happen that way" "why not stay"
And every time the peach dream pops I run straight into another
And abandon what I've learned for the sake of the pride of another
And I feel just as fake as an otome game lead
When it gets too hard, select another lover, when I start to glitch,
Restart the game, because when I'm sick, dying, hospitalized
And I look around and see I'm still all alone,
At least I've got pretty pictures, pretty words, pretty lies
To look at on my phone.

I’m in the same way I am tired of speaking, tired of my written voice.
I’m by no means burnt out but I feel watered down, and I want to say it’s just my way of coming off an emotional haze.

Because I’m not the girl who burned hot and fast and bright and died out.
I’m just me. Lashing out and breaking down.

Falling.gasping. Desperate.scared
Wet concrete, colder than the laser light dome
tendons aching from the running.
Collar bruised. Lip bleeding.
Costume... tor n at the waist.
It was. Well it makes more sense
When you know it was a big bad wolf
who threw her against the-
Blood. Biting wind. Headlights passing.
But there was warmth
Green eyes. Sunshine hair. Toothy grin.
Arms saying "everything will be okay"
Not like.
The wolves.
With their rough palms. Leers. Cars.
Heaving. Sobbing. Spitting. Running fingertips
across the cold concrete until they bleed.
A broken cell phone so like a broken bottle
Its so much worse to be betrayed by
One's own last hope.
Starving.empty*

Black

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.

I lost the 10lbs I wanted to.
I'm at a healthy BMI.
I don't starve myself, I've lucky genetics
I work hard, I exercise on days off.

But now I want to be 115lbs, beautiful,
With a voice like Karen Carpenter,
And a heart as careless as the weather
I want to work hard to understand the long hours my ex worked,
Though my mom reminds me she worked much harder, longer hours, 16 to my 12.
I want to be as exciting and vapid and beautiful as the girls you like
Though that's not why you don't want me, and I'll never be
As beautiful as they.
I want to be as capable and desirable as others would have had me be
In order to have kept me,
When they never would have wanted to keep me anyway.
I want me to be everything they wanted me to be because
The reality that they just didn't want me is too heartbreaking
And my heart's too broken to keep living with rejection for just being me.
So I'll keep wasting away until I'm so thin and perfect I just slip out
Of existence.

I want to go to bed
It's not a question, it just is
I'm a broken little doll,
But I can't feel a thing
Drunk or sober,
Whole or bleeding,
Dead or sleeping,
No, I can't feel a thing

Lazy afternoons and sleeping pills,
Washed out episodes of Winnie-The-Pooh and
Printed photos of a little girl I wish I knew

A dry riverbed, feels like a shut down KOA
These electronic waves are eating me alive
Old razors won't keep the spiders at bay

Slanted rhymes like slanted eyes,
If I wind the radio up just right
Can the music take me away tonight

Back to sleeping pills and scalding baths
And mid-melodramatic heart attacks
In the heat of a June I doubt I'll survive
But if I get back from this broken road,
I'll talk to you tomorrow

Then I'll talk to you tomorrow

I miss Texas - My family fighting,
The smell of the hot concrete,
That full-bladed grass and the fire ants
The southern drawl and the heavy air-
Sticky and slow like molasses
Down where you nap through the heat of the day
And eat fried chicken, corn and mashed taters for dinner
Playing in sprinklers and
Patios made of tiny rocks,
Acorns and sunflowers and furniture
That weathered the great depression and WWII
The little creek, the metal slide in the middle of July,
Those mcDonalds toys one grandma collected
One grandpa bouncing me on his knee
The other taking me to the zoo
And great grandma playing scrabble,
Those baby pictures of my dad,
Back in a place where I would've culturally said "pa"
Sometimes I miss it all back in Texas,
Sometimes I say I'll never miss it,
Now that I see how grandma's a racist, family don't believe in LGBT,
In liberals, in me
But then I think I've lied
I just miss Texas from back when I was too young to notice,
And before everyone died.

Are you cold, my darling? You're shivering-
Shrugs me off, says she's never felt warmer
Throws on slippers and disappears past me down the hall, I'm left
Hand outstretched
//
My girl can't stand to sleep alone
I work all night just to come home
To strangers in our bed, and I ache
For how lonely she must have felt
//
My darling girl, why don't you rest your sleepy head,
You can't face all the demons inside, can't go to sleep,
Instead you've fled and I,
Pinned your wings to the ground, like so many,
But like only me, I let you go and so,
You chose to stay, it's the only way you would
I'm afraid,
You're always ready to fly away from me
And I, can't stand to see you go too far
I'm frightened.
Can't keep the tears away when I see you turn
away with a frown, concentrate too ******* spreading jam
Stirring tea
Artificial warmth, like the heat you swear radiates off my shirt
I gave you and the forced desire
To always keep things civil, traditional, a facade of happy-
Just. nice.
But we're a cluster of stars, burning and dying.
And you can't blame me for trying to keep you wild,
Nor for wishing you'd let me in and take me along.
I'm just a man.

"I love you"
Funny, mechanic, polite
Sticky flypaper
Chewing paper
Tobacco filter
Pretty, warm, sugarcane
My *** and whiskey lies
I'm trying to abstain

Like passing off my straight coke
As *** n Coke to a drinking friend
Who will never understand
And I don't love you,
But with a watered down reply
And a smile wound too tight
Think maybe someday it won't hurt

To not walk alone at night, or to
Swim with someone watching out so
I don't. Disappear. But instead I'm unwillingly ensnared
Netted so I can't
Dive away in the stormy sea
By you
It's immaterial, I could go, should go, any time
Though how many have I hurt by... shredding their
Expensive ****** fishing gear

When I go night swimming alone
All I think of is someone else beside me

And when you're in the car in the drive
Picking me up instead
I feel oil, dust, condensation and ..
...
I'm heading for a reparation, instead,
Because "I love you" makes my heart, head
And tongue full of lead.

My ex deserved perfect
A man's wife kind of wife,
An honest, hard working life

He deserved a woman who could be kind,
Compassionate and intuitive with him,
Laugh with all his friends,

A wife who didn't question too much,
Made and cleaned up after lunch,
Someone just good enough in bed

Someone smart but not too well-read,
A wife who would follow where he led.
A woman that he would happily wed,

Is a perfect woman I could never be
(And I hope one day, that he can see
In someone what he once saw in me).

A perfect woman, is what he sought
And he deserves perfect,
But no one is perfect

So that's what he got.

You will always have my heart, but
I'll start ******* out the numbness
That's leaked into my body.

Would you love me in a hundred ways?
In goodmornings and goodnights,
Flowers and falling ill,
together on the couch with an Xbox
And a box of Kleenex between-

Would you love me in words unsaid,
Good deeds unseen and bouts of malicious intent
forgiven. IF I could be forgiven. That you would forgive me
In each of these hundred ways you love me

I met a lover lied. I told him all my lullabies.
But the silence in my heart drove him mad.
Drove him mad.
He said I’m screaming.
Like a little bowl
Echoing off the essence of a hollow soul

Please. Leave the light on.
I didn't mean to be gone so long.
I didn't even know what it meant to leave a light on,
Until I saw the porch light through the fog and trees.
So please.
One more time, for me,
Leave it on, to guide me back to where I need to be.

Do away with the doubt
And the fear
And trust the block,
Trust the blade above my head
I just want to say I have a small issue
Not big at all, I don’t mean to criticize
Only it seems a little rickety
In your craftsmanship.
And in the disdain in your eyes.

I might just be an echo of a star trying to burn her way home

Oh Darling, do say you were,
I think I was in your dream last night,
I came in late like walking into an occupied room
And curled into bed like you were there, sleeping on your side
I swear I heard you dreaming, within the slumbered breathing that wasn't there
I could've sworn the pillow was damp from your shower,
That I almost tripped on your shoes
Oh wake up, wake up and fly to me, let us not delay
And make that dream a reality
Like we were some epic, the fateful reunion to the joyous conclusion
of the play
And not climbing into empty beds, each wishing we weren't alone
Do say you were dreaming,
For I feel I may be dreaming, too

I'm upset,
I'm unhappy, but I
Don't want anyone to fret
So I'm stable enough
To just get by

What a beautiful sorrow, what a beautiful pain
That I can't touch you in the morning,
I can't take your tears away
And as a lark I sing for you, you feel the depths of my emotion
This voice you gave me, I'll gladly share
I wish you'd do the same
I wish you'd feel the same
But I can't reach you, I can't hold my hand out and try
You wouldn't take it if I offered,
I can't hold you when you cry
But you're so beautiful, I wish you wouldn't despair
You're so full of life, but there's nothing there

Ghost kisses across my skin,
Gleaming white from the blade,
Music notes seeping out under my sleeves,
The days I cut with rib-bones like a knife,
They dreamed they could save me,
Drag me from the depths of my self-hate sea

I said I was made of stars, they burned bright,
In phosphenes and fluorescents in the night

Said love could save me, be the one thing that wouldn't hurt
Only self love saved me, though I'm content to have the memory of notes unsung,
Of nights unspent,
Of kisses too long ago to have had,
to have burned.

I listen to music which makes me cry,
Begging it to let me down one more time
Sun-soaked, riding down from an adrenaline high
Laughing, tossing, thrown around the carnival
Fried, sugary kisses into the sunset
Cheap polyester prizes and
Knowing we ain't made of time,
But spontaneous dreams and childlike wonder
We won't run out this time,
I'd bet one more ride, and always
One more song

I live my life in constant fear of finding out,
That all the adventures worth-while
Are done
That there is nothing left to discover,
Nothing wild,
And there will be too many rules guarding,
Those which remain.

This house has steadily been built by tears
From divorce and death and heartache throughout the years
It's curled up in the carpet, where an 11 year old dried her eyes
And in the depths of memories,
All the pain, the alcoholism and goodbyes
Now there's a woman who holds her own throughout the day,
Cries silent tears into the master bedroom walls at night
There's a boarder sobbing in the living room while her dog whines
And when I've cried my throat hoarse in the same room as all I've mourned,
I go outside to smoke and make it worse.

Rip open my veins, blood-stained teeth bare
Snapping ribs as you unwrap them-
Crawl inside, child. Home.
Two beating hearts as one
Blistering beneath a polluted sky
You are as hard to look upon as the sun,
My one biggest lie
I need you I need you I need you

But glazed eyes, dried tears and split seams,
I could never keep you

I used to date
Now I just hate
It's a little
Silly stringing
Me along when you say
It's better if you go away
Tripping down a road
With water streaming between
Can't help but think
That the separation of my legs
And the stream, that's all it takes
Seeing what we'd never be
A bee and ant will never live in harmony

I used to love
Crushed by a dove
White feathers
Floating blood down upon
My arms,
I scratched,
Against the thorns,
You spit from your teeth
Come on closer to me

If we are, we are
But I don't pretend to know it
Side-stepping affection gone putrid
It's stupid
Thinking I got along fine
Before I left you behind

I used to connect
Warmth, I used to let
Fill up a gas tank
Leaking slowly
Open a valve like a locket
pour in the oil
I used to date it,
But now I hate it,
This crap you're giving out
Won't sustain, I'll clog the spout

And if I scream in anthology
Analogy, metaphorically,
Speaking, I'm going to die.