We make our judgements through ***** windows. We make our promises behind the suns back. We break eachothers hearts and use the pieces to make tree branches reach for the sky. We don't just fall apart, we wreck ourselves to make art in hopes that someone will like our pictures eventually. I don't know about you, but I don't think I want to live like this anymore.

I stand before you wishing I could suffocate myself, but instead i'm picking flowers from a field of dead men.

I want to love myself, but you can't love something that you've hated for so long. I can't just flip a switch and decide that I am good enough. I sit by myself overthinking and wondering if I still want to live. I've hated myself for so long that when my name rolled off his lips in the same sentence as beautiful, I cried laughing. Beautiful was a word to describe his eyes, or the sunsets and sunrises he watched, or all the things he ever did because it made him happy. He was my definition of beautiful. But as my name and that word were put in the same sentence I remember what I wanted to forget. I remembered all my imperfections and how much I hated myself for having them. I remembered the bullies that made me want to die. I remembered the notes left in my locker with instructions to **** myself, I remember the bleach bottle left in my car, the box cutter in my instrument case. I remember all of it. It wasn't beautiful. It wasn't pretty. It was gruesome. It was red and dark. But it was okay. Because as my name and the word beautiful left his lips, I didn't hate myself.

Poetry doesn't come to me like it used to.
I used to be able to sit and write about whatever I was feeling.
Now I sit for hours wondering if it was the people that made my mind stop opening up, or if I ******* myself over with how much i've been isolating myself.

I write poetry
for strangers
instead of my friends
because I can't see
my fears and dreams
reflected off the eyes
of strangers they way I can
in the mirrors
that are my loved ones
and looking
at other people is far
easier than looking
at myself
trying to find
the spots that gleam
in the sunlight

The statistical impossibility of our births is something that hurts even more when your parents aren't fit for the role as such and you grow up in this haze of if and when. Of "If I catch you, when I catch you", and you learn to run faster than any Olympian but you're too afraid of going to practice because you know your parents will be there and you are a prize, something to be marveled at, and you are breakable and replaceable and you know the second you do wrong, like when you lost the spelling bee on the word Massachusetts, they will be there for you. You will always remember that there are two T's at the end because there's no way to escape the brand on your soul of making a mistake in their eyes. Parents will always be there for you.

But so will vultures when you die.
But so will death, waiting for you to make a mistake.