We need to move away from this constant need of coming across as calm, cool and collected. We weren’t built to be calm, cool, and collected. If we were, it wouldn’t feel so exhausting all the time. It would, you know, come naturally to us. You know what comes naturally to human beings though? Being open, being messy, being raw, being unfiltered, having lots of feelings. Why should we have to stifle our true nature? Let’s go after the things we want, let’s love each other brutally and honestly, and not worry about the consequences. Let’s release the feelings inside of us and let them land somewhere special. Otherwise, we might have a lifetime of longing in front of us

She was the kind of girl that they named storms and stars after, the kind of girl that was born in a hurricane

Please stop trying to fix her.
Broken girls are vibrant sorts,
with eyes that glow with sadness,
but also with a gift for understanding
lost souls like themselves.
They endure sleepless nights
and learn about trauma young,
to help others when
they endure the same
They understand the power
of a random act of kindness
more than anyone.
But most of all.
Broken girls
know how to fix
themselves,
without destroying
Those cracked parts
through which the light
shines through.
So please.
Stop trying to fix her.
And let her fix herself.
”
— Broken Girls Are A Gift not a Burden

Here’s to the security guards who maybe had a degree in another land.
Here’s to the manicurist who had to leave her family to come here, painting the nails, scrubbing the feet of strangers.
Here’s to the janitors who don’t even ******* understand English yet work hard despite it all.
Here’s to the fast food workers who work hard to see their family smile.
Here’s to the laundry man downtown who told me with the sparkle in his eyes how he was an engineer in Peru.
Here’s to the bus driver, the grey haired angel who almost danced when I quoted Nelson Mandela.
Here’s to the harvesters who live in fear of being deported for coming here to open the road for their future generation.
Here’s to the foreigners here to make ends meet..Here is to them waking up at 4am, calling home to hear the voices of their loved ones. Here is to their children, to the children who despite it all become artists, writers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, activists and rebels.
Here’s to our patriots. For never forgetting home. Here’s to their children who carry the heartbeats of their motherland and even in sleep, speak with pride about their fathers. Keep on...

“The world forbids me to live, but I am forced to breathe

“I don’t think heartbreak is a beautiful thing.
I don’t think not being able to sleep until 3 am is beautiful.
I don’t think changing multiple songs because it hurts too much to listen is beautiful.
I don’t think the pain that stains your cheek is art.
To me, heartbreak is something I would never wish upon my worst enemy. The act of being abandoned. Lost. Still haunted by a ghost that is long gone. Heartbreak is not beautiful nor art. Heartbreak are the needles puncturing you, making it impossible to forget

“These bones could not contain my breaking, I am titanium plated, I harbor a splintered existence. My breath leaves rust on my lips. I still cannot end my poems in ‘I love you’, at the end I can only find loss

“All poets have their own personal problems
If we didn’t
We wouldn’t exist”

They say old wounds heal with time but why does it feel like I could die?

“She will sleep
with her heart strings
knotted and forgotten
on the bedroom floor
while he will lay awake
wishing he had
used his hands
instead of a knife”

“She’s a bunch of broken maybes, never certain, never known, not even to herself.

I want to be with someone who makes me feel like a poem.

Anxiety in the streets, insomnia in the sheets.

The only mortal that can heal me is myself and until i learn the art of self-healing, i'll be a broken spirit.

My cousin and I get hammered
It’s his mother’s funeral and we sit around the fire, drinking horrible mixes from red solo cups
He tells me he does ******* and acid
I tell him I take Adderall and pain killers
We are both just trying to numb the pain from everything we would never quite get to do.

i wonder
what
waking up to me
feels like -
sunlight
healing your skin,
or
saltwater
burning your wounds?Probably saltwater burning my wounds.

We all have become so exceptionally good at faking our happiness…We no longer know when we are actually happy or when the smile is only for the world to see and not to be felt.

At the very least, poetry and science are sisters.
But, more likely, they are the soul and the body,
sharing a single heart,
whispering arias to the universe,
waiting to hear it singing back

“I dug through the landfill of your chest
and found the meadow where
the sun god goes
to rest his eyes.
I thought, this must be where Mother Earth
pressed your heart between her hands,
because I could feel her fingerprints
seared to the curve of your ribs.
I pilfered your dark places—
the ones where the moon likes to hide.
I found the parts of yourself
you thought you were supposed
to be ashamed of.
I kissed all your secrets.
They looked too much like mine.
Truth is, I have no idea
if we were any good for one another,
but I know our demons all got along
with each other just fine.”

My cousin and I get hammered
It’s his mother’s funeral and we sit around the fire, drinking horrible mixes from red solo cups
He tells me he does ******* and acid
I tell him I take Adderall and pain killers
We are both just trying to numb the pain from everything we would never quite get to do”

I wait for my mother to go to bed
Its two am and I am sleeping in the living room yet again
I stay up all night
And close my eyes as I inhale even more smoke, as I try to **** myself even more”

“I wrote my suicide notes days , no weeks, no months, no over a year ago today
But still
I stand here breathing
And there is a ghost standing over me from my past that I can’t seem to shake
So even tonight
I lay in bed
And wonder
Will I never want to take the bottle full of pills”

Have you had your soul hurt so bad that you felt like dying?

she was the girl who read the Bible,
the girl who put her hope in his word
the girl who still prayed even without answers

she was the girl who had a simple heart
the girl who loved God above all things
the girl who forgave without receive an apology

she was the girl who believed, who was patient
who didn’t give up and in the end, she was the girl
who was always disappointed and remained unhappy.

They say "Your darkest hour comes before the dawn" but I am forever suffering and I still don't know what happiness feels like. I was at a funeral today, staring the coffin, I envy the person in it. When will my time to find peace in a coffin come? I am suffering and tired of waiting. I AM SUFFERING!

Some girls like me are full of heartache and poetry and those are the kind of girls who try to save wolves instead of running away from them

Not happy, not sad just present.

“I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”

Time isn’t going to heal your wounds. It will just make them easier to conceal to the point where you forget you have them

“The point about hope is that it is something that occurs in very dark moments. It is like a flame in the darkness; it isn’t like a confidence and a promise.”

“You draw constellations
in my freckles.
I mean you ask me
not to fall in love with you
and then you go write poems
with your tongue
and draw constellations
in my freckles

I was initially attracted to him depth of feeling.
Even her pain I found appealing

"I don't like being naked, my skin has been through too much." - Naledi Raba

"Let me braid your hair, let's play a game of truth or dare.. Rather 'dare', because 'truth' will expose that you are broken"- Hlengiwe Mbatha

Sometimes I feel like a wrong answer someone blurted out by accident, I’m awkwardly hanging in the air, wrong and stupid, hoping someone else will come in with the right answer and save me from the embarrassment of myself

"He never spoke much, but I couldn't ignore the conversations his eyes communicated

“There is no normal
There is no okay
But there’s a kind of normal
And a kind of okay
That makes everything berable”

now close your eyes,
and please understand
that you are still young,
and the universe is endless,
and somehow,
everything will be okay

I am in love with letters and the words they create.

A coffin seems more like a peaceful place to lay just silent and resting. No more hurting and melancholy. Just peace and serenity.

"I've sunk to my lowest point, I've drowned."

"I'm falling deeper, I can feel the crushing of the shells on the bottom of the ocean floor. I'm letting go of the drift, I've hit rock bottom."

"Here I am stuck in the empty waters, struggling to get out. The water so deep I can't feel the ground. I can't feel the ground. The darkness is in the air. It almost feels like I am drowning, there's no room to breathe I'm going under."

I woke up and it felt like suicide again. This depression always succeeds. All the time. I am tired and no, not the sleepy kind of tired but the emotionally and physically drained type of tired. I hope, I keep the faith but that gets me nowhere because yet again I feel like this all the time. I want to escape. Good things were never for me. Happiness was never for me.

When the road is dark and you no longer can see.

There are some things that are not meant to be sugar coated
There are some things that are not suppose to be cleaned up and meant to look good
Do not sugarcoat the night you were ***** or the aftermath
Do not sugarcoat the nights you’ve taken a blade to your wrists
Do not sugarcoat the first time you downed ***** because your heart was broken
Do not sugarcoat when your parents hit you
Do not sugarcoat when your boyfriend absolutely destroyed you
Do not sugarcoat the reasons why you started using drugs
Do not sugarcoat vices
Do not sugarcoat pain
Do not sugarcoat suffering
Do not sugarcoat agony
Do not sugarcoat me”
— Some things should be sugarcoated. These are not it

“I can’t speak my mind. But I can write it well enough.”

Why do we need sanity
when we can match the
colour of our shoes with
the bags under our eyes?

Let them tell you just
how good your anxiety
goes with your depression.

(Insomnia comes free when
you buy them together.)

Do you think she’ll tell you
where she picked up her neurosis,
and I wonder if they have it in my size

Turned lonely into solitary confinement and apathy into a ******* contest.

I'm living in a permanent funeral.