and what if you’re the one that got away?
what if i wasted all those months hopelessly in denial,
swimming in my passivity?
those records play
my head spins
favorite friend;
you’re sick of me, i have a sneaking suspicion.
what if i’m still hanging onto your diction,
every party waiting for the way you crinkle your face when you laugh?
don’t be bitter, i didn’t understand the feelings when they were all that was floating around.
forgive my cluelessness.
i’ve been chasing immovable objects,
bodies that dance like fireflies,
bodies that fail to understand why everything has significance.
i cannot prove this to you;
i’ve run out of all my blood
and now the mosquitos have nothing to take from me.

i’ll find you one day,
dripping peach juice from your chewing mouth.
perhaps you’ll learn to resent me,
learn to forget the mark i left on your spine.
suddenly,
i’m searching for your approval.
i’m finding ways to wind up in your bedroom.
i’m looking for circumstances where we run into each other
and lock eyes in a way only we know how.
i’ll find you one day.
if we cannot have everything,
i’ll at least capture the summer sun in a jar
and give it to you as a symbol of my heart.
suddenly,
i’m creating stories where we see each other on a desert highway
and recall the nights that we danced with forever,
but somehow that wasn’t long enough.
i’ll write poetry that sticks to the back of your throat,
coat my sheets with your memories.
i’ll find you one day,
not searching for me,
content in a lifetime where our lives fail to align.
i’ll find you one day with someone,
and i’ll remember how close i came to being someone to you.
i wonder if she means anything
or if she just represents what you feel you lack.
i’ll find you one day,
at the edge of a bridge,
pretending to fly as you cannonball into the river.
i wish you had loved me with all you were capable of.

i wish you would love me with all you are capable of.

need to stop replaying the memory
why does it live under my skin?
at the bus station,
i’m watching these moments
pass by my head
i’m starting to wish i was her
but i don’t want his body nor his recklessness.
i’ll never be a girl you need
but then why did you tell me
all those falsities?
for me to keep them still
in the cavities of my chest,
to not dare release them
from their ribcage prisons?
there i go,
back to the memory,
back to the arms that weren’t ashamed to hold me
back to the rhythm of what seemed to matter
but now it just fades
and i’m expected to let it dissipate.
can you blame me for wanting to resuscitate it?

you shrink yourself down to someone else
create an image that might only work for a couple months
i hope you and him hate each other after all this
i hope you split his heart in half
i hope his knuckles get soft and his eyeballs rot
i hope you freak out when he’s beside you
i hope i echo like a freight train
in your brain
i hope the lies that you told attempt to sing you lullabies on your sleepless nights, but only conjure up nightmares
i hope you grip them hard in your palms and make him sob.
i hope your remembrance of me strikes you guilty,
i hope the circumstances make you wither,
but then i hope you don’t have to live with yourself any longer
and i hope you change
and stop worshipping yourself.
i hope this charade ends with you,
ashamed and sunken,
realizing that your ego will always crack
leaving only you and its remnants.
i hope you want it all back
but as you can see,
it is dead and buried.
i hope your body abandons your mind
 and finds a new host.
i hope you never go back to your scheming,
i hope you change
and never revert back to who you were.


i apologize; i am only a little spiteful.

when my breath fogs up the inside of this glass jar
that you keep me confined in,
my body pulses with the familiar letdown:
that you’d leave me on the side of the highway
if further instructed, pushed.
i am but a daughter trapped in her expectations
of love never comprehended.
below the knife,
i’m being watched
so i listen,
clip my own wings,
cut off my own tongue.

and what did i become in a moment—
not an entity i ever wanted to be.
and don’t you understand
i just don’t
have it in myself anymore
to mean nothing
to those that mean everything to me.
i became someone i hate
i wait outside, on your porch,
trying to trap light through my fingers.
i wish no one had to love,
had to tiptoe around themselves,
had to transform into what they never wanted.
i wish i never desired
to be meaningful to others.
the world would be much easier.
i don’t feel understood,
i just feel empty—
like everyone else is living but
i cannot
fit the oxygen mask
around my mouth in time.
in a cruel world,
i made myself the cruelest
and how do i reconcile with that?

what else can i give,
offer up until there is just a
shadow left?
i don’t know who to be anymore
and i just need to be guided,
hand in hand.
i’m young and the world
has left me lost
and i am nothing of
what i’ve always
wanted to be.
i am nothing;
i lose that feeling until it is
back on my porch,
trying to trap light through its fingers
and i always let it in.

the blue start of the night
stares into my bones.
i’m torn at the seams;
the company i keep does not wish to keep me
and, if it does,
solely like a secret, something to be
hidden, unable to be uncovered.
if i share all of me, what will be
left to say
and who says you won’t leave, let
me disintegrate?
there’s nothing to keep;
the depths of what i love
is unreachable,
unattainable. the
lives of all bodies that traversed
into and completely out of my mind,
left behind a trace of emptiness
that i once interpreted
as love—
a beast that denies itself to those
who ache to touch it.
i’ll lay blank upon the grass,
counting the ghosts of those
who have left.
watching the footsteps of them
get lost in
the passage of time,
sand covering up the heels,
chasing away the memories
that once lived in the dents.

you left footsteps in me;
the funny thing is i’ve tried to
preserve them, in vain but,
i cannot love what is destined
to be left behind,
what is bound to be lost to time.