The best poems are all about
loss and pain and suffering.
It feels more natural to write a poem
about a long lost memory,
Or a love that never worked.

Poets aren't allowed to be happy.
They’d run out of material to write about.

The words
content and happy
in the same sentence as the word
I'm,
feels like your tongue
never sitting right in your mouth,
like teeth getting in the way
when making out
like an itchy throat,
not going away even after coughing a fit.

The phrases
You are and my boyfriend
can't be a real sentence
like how
unicorns and fairytales
don't exist.
They just feel like
two jigsaw pieces
from different parts of the puzzle
forced to sit beside each other.

The word love
just doesn’t resonate
with the beat of my heart.
Maybe because
my heart stopped beating
a long time ago
and my brain had to carry the workload
so I think twice as much as I should
synonyms?
I overthink.

I may be the only poet
who doesn’t want to be happy;
a ******* clinging to heartbreak,
and loss and pain and suffering.
because it’s easier to let heartbreak
wrap myself in its familiar arms
than to experience an adventure
with happiness wrapped in mine.

Sometimes I just wish I could hug you.
Like a sweet little novel I've been dying to read, I wish to read you, all over, front and back, spine to paper.
And yes, often times, I just wish I could wrap you up in a roll of oozing vanilla and breathe the moment in.
I wish I could tell you that you're worth more than the girl who left you standing on you front porch with a lingering love.
Sometimes, I wish that your eyes would softly rest upon mine and feel peace in knowing your life is not complete with her, but rather complemented, perhaps, with me.
Someday I wish you look at life's disappointments as a step towards greater and not a stand still of why's and why-not's.
And if you're willing, I would hope you sit and wish the same for me.

- Julia Aubrey Rhodes -

You are the beast sleeping silent inside me
I imprisoned you in my ribcage
But you made caverns and crawl spaces of my arteries where you slink through and pulse your bulbous, blackening body with every beat of my heart
In the daylight I hate you enough to forget about you
But at night
I feel you stir and purr as you lazily stretch your body until it fills the space of mine
As if I were the second skin

You have made a puppet out of me
Held up on the strings of your whims I can feel you piloting this carcass
And like clockwork each night you heave your way out of my throat
All smoke and lightning and blood you curl yourself around me
And frost blooms on my neck where you kiss me goodnight
Come the dawn I will look for you again in my ribcage, feel you there
Sleeping silent
Beast
I hate you

you toy with this body And i feel my joints creak
Like a door on stiff hinges that dances in the wind
Beast you are the wind
You are the hinges, too
Which is to say you are the creaking of my body
Which is to say I would not be me without you