I want to skip forward to the best parts,
Talking until my throat is raspy and,
drinking burning coffee at 6am as the sun rises over the line of houses.
Pale painted skin as I wait in nervous anticipation for your test to come back—
hoping that the line will read positive, and dreading the line will tell us that too.

I want to skip past our fight about the time I got too drunk, run past the part where,
I, in my self pity, collapsed against your porch door, unable to reach the cheaply made bronze.
The time I snapped at you for another self derogatory statement, trying to tell you, your scars aren’t a sign of weakness. I tried to tell you how strong you were, to stand there and live against all odds, but…
Somehow I made it about me, and at three forty two, I realized my mistake.

Red lines mark our history, and my mechanical pencil can’t erase these grades,
Signs that told me to stop, but I had no intention of leaving.
You told me you didn’t understand, why I stayed,
And I had to tell you,
It was because I couldn’t love you.

You, who loved me
And me, who couldn’t
          because the heart I had failed.
but I choose to love you anyways.
          a choice I haven’t regretted.

How about we skip to the night I held you in my arms and refused to let you go? Or the day I surprised you with your favorite dinner, even if I was a terrible cook, you smiled at me and we ordered pizza instead?

A choice, a choice, will those kids ever learn?
Love isn’t a feeling in your breast, or clogging your senses.

Remember how I said I wanted to skip past our fights? I changed my mind.
… those fights made us,
and so I hope you say yes, will that cute half smirk you always gave me,

when I hand you your favorite book, a ring dangling from a chain, marking my favorite passage.


Lets not chase after these next few years,
Let us just live them first.

with love,

Fingers moving, spinning an eerie dangling tale
Rising and falling, stroke by stroke
Gleaming castle towers to decrepit dungeons
Rich, sumptuous royalty coated in silver starling laughing amongst themselves
Threadbare, holed, dulled eyes staring out beneath a thatched roof
Voices calling out in anger, fear, and loneliness
Wanting to be heard, to be seen by those in gilded gold crowns
Faster now, heartbeat racing across a shoreline
Waves crashing down, breaking on the rocks
Whitewater rapids burst through a hollowed cavern
Lost faces, bent minds, warped bodies
Strung out in a single note
Dancing in the gentle moonlight
Hand on hand, twirling to the beat of the bird's twitter
Slowly falling in love, and the sorrow of knowing it's ephemeral
Grasping at strings being cut with a crude iron knife
Empty eyes, sinking in despair under the calming storm
Nights of blood and days of woebegone
Years of lingering in the shadows
Forgotten smiles, and nostalgic memories
Imbued in a mellifluous melody
Joyous delight of a child
The summery silence of a violet sunset
Laying with a loved one, hearts intertwined
Sweet stories, happy ever afters
Sung out in the ascending vocals
Gone, world's faded to black and white
Melancholy of what used to be
Murky gloom, painted in tears fallen
Plucking away, living in the moment of flying hands on a bow
****** into a spiraling forest of lyrical dreams
High seas and low tides
Wind whipping through the smoke saturated air
Bodies broken fall as autumnal leaves
Winter seizes with an icy grasp
Gleaming and glimmering against a deathly drop down to the snow ridden plains
Gossamer webs of cracks in a sea colored glacier
Breaking apart to reveal green grass in violent shades
And vines creeping, choking tendrils fighting, struggling
And when the silence ensues, the music put away for the time
She plays the soul sound again, telling an epic, a saga of heartbreak, and healing
A poem about the seasons in intricate detailing, written to show the world
That broken bodies and minds can create ethereal and ineffable legends

She stood up, her hair pulled back into two braids,
A question lingering on her lips as she stared at me.
“Why don't you want to get better?” She asked, a face of intrusion
I looked at her, feeling for an answer that I knew existed somewhere
“I think,” I started to say, “That I want to, but I've grown so used to feeling wrong,
That I no longer understand how to feel right. There is a monster inside of my body,
he bears my name, he haunts my mind, and whispers to me. He has me wrapped around her finger, a delicious little nightmare.”
The girl stared at me with squinted eyes and a confused smile.
“I don't understand, you put yourself into your work, does he go to? Does your nightmare walk with you everyday?”
“He flows through my fingers into the ink on this page and every page; he leaves me behind sometimes, and when he does, I am less than nothing. Yes, you can see me then, but I am not me without her. My little nightmare's heart is my own. Learning to live without my pretty little nightmare is like being thrown into the ocean and not knowing how to swim.”
A look of dawning appeared in her eyes, spotted with curiosity,
In this place of white walls and white floors and white beds
This was the only color
“Wouldn't it help if you weren't left alone with her? You always lock yourself away in that awful room with no one to help you.”
I could reply with a sharp retort, a tactic of distance,
But she wasn't being mean and simply wanted to understand
Which is more than most have tried to do.
“I isolate myself because fighting her and speaking with you are exhausting to a guy like me.”
I gave her a weak smile, a shattered smile, but a smile with red lips and white teeth all the same.
“What kind of guy are you?”
My eyes faded and my mouth shut
A streak of memory burst through my heart, a twisted bolt poisoned
“A broken one.”
She gave me a toothy grin, a contagious grin
and skipped up to me with her little red shoes.
“Let me put you back together again. I promise I won't lose a piece.”
She grabbed my hands and pulled me out of my chair
Fear shocked my body as my sleeves were pulled away,
revealing the masterpiece I'd drawn on my skin with iron
But the little girl only took out a band aid and put it over a scar, saying
“I won't let you fall apart again. I'll help you learn to live again. I promise.”
She gave me her pinky finger and crossed it over mine. “Pinky promise.”
And then jumped up and down with excitement.
I looked over as a white gowned woman entered the room.
“Miss,” I called out. “Why is she here?” I pointed to the little girl
The nurse said with a sad truth, “She brought herself in, said her mother left her and she hurt and that this is where hurting people came, sweet child.”
I looked back at the child, grinning at me
And she stared back at me, a whisper caressing her mind
“Please don't leave me. Everyone leaves. Are you going to leave?”
I took her in my arms, and told her this—
“I won't go away. I'll stay with you and you'll stay with me. I promise.”

Start with a word, any word.
And then a year later you might find a hundred pages.
A story just begun, a tale, that, in reality, needs some editing.
But I didn’t find myself in these pages I’d written, like the inspirational quotes say.
I found my characters, I found a few bad habits too,
Like how I bite my fingers as I stare at my computer in frustration,
Or stare at the wall in blank fixation.

Once the word is picked, don’t bleed out onto the screen,
Hold yourself together, else you won't have to lips to pour forth a single key.
Some old dude told you to bleed, didn’t he?
I’ve found, I don’t bleed until page 71,
When I have bonded with Jonathon,
And now I must watch him mourn his fiancee,
Who never got to propose.

Be careful about your planning. Too methodical,
And you’ll lose yourself in the untold parts,
Too spontaneous and you’ll see your story turned from
An epic dragon escape to a horror filled romance.
Find a medium of crazy that suits you, and remember the details
Of the night you tried marijuana and coughed as the smoke hit your throat.

Hug the computer tight, don’t let anyone see
Until you’ve determined the story strong. Some people open up at the blank page,
While others hide it away until it’s a polished four hundred and sixty two, front and back.
Say, here’s an idea—don’t forget to study your grammar too.
Unless, of course, you’re poetry demands to be free,
then flow round the corner and hesitate not with commas
theyll be no use for you.

After all this advice, I’ll tell you one thing.
Forget all of it, it’ll be nothing to you.
We storytellers like to go on and on about how to write,
When we barely ever write a real story of characters in between speeches.
If the only thing I could tell you, the only important fact I can say with utter certainty is,

For god’s sake,
Write.

I go to write another chapter
But then I realize I have nothing to say
So I go to write another poem
And I realize that nothingness is all I have right now
It's burning hand reaching into my chest, into that void
And pulling out that emptiness
Leaving but a husk of skin and blood
With the brain lying on the floor beside the corpse.

With the waves crashing down on my mind
I struggle to breath, water filling my broken lungs,
Tears mixing with the salty sea, swallowing my body in it's roiling currents
Breaking down the elements into a dust,
Scattered dreams and thoughts floating on a gilded surface
With the fire flowing down my skin
I whimper as it consumes my identity, sparks lighting up my eyes
Burning my skin, hollowing my heart and stealing my cares
Boiling my blood away, into a vapor trailing through the atmosphere
Tearing my essence apart, the embers glowing like an abandoned forge
Crippled limbs of heavens long forgotten by time and it's friends

Water and fire, they burn and drown,
If I could say which was worse, I wouldn't have a blackened or suffocated mind
If I could choose one to die from, to go out in pain or peace
Both with arrant beauty as death and love take me away
into the beyond abyss, far into the depths, and high above the sky
In a place of nothing, of absence and complete nonexistence
Then I would have to say, the sound of home, a crackling fire
would be a remembrance of a life, but in suffering I shall go
Yet I find myself drawn as lead to paper
to the idea of acceptance in the sea's lovely grasp
A burden left behind on the shoreline, with the lost and unknown as company

So, shall the decision cost me a life?
No, I say, it will not cost me anything but a body already dead
Shredded by words scorned stones thrown by the living
Although they are murderers in each's own right,
I stand Queen to that title, for they did not cast those looks for free, nor alone
In the night I stood at an altar and bleed for my gods,
In the day I prayed for salvation from my nightmares around me
Seek the light, they would tell me, and you will be found
But I have lived in this darkness for so long, it has become me and my home
A shelter from the storm swirling outside these cobweb walls
Caught inside, a spider without a will to fight

Must there be an answer to the long abated question;
Is there a reply I can formulate without the harshness of their words to punish back?
The world is a wondrously tragic truth no one can read but those who are too, a truth
Born of the miseries and the deaths that bring about that talk of devils and demons
The ones that live inside my head, who made me an empress, the ones who stole me away
and gave me the choice; of peace or suffering?
Is it not so imperfect that I must choose, an unworthy merit to make me take
Of all the liberties given, the only one I wish not to see
Is the one standing in front of me.

The falchion was forged in the twilight
Seared by flames that burned white with rage
And cast with sanguine silver stars
As the day transformed into night
The sky was alight, scorched by the golden rays
Deepening into a colorless void, grey mists unraveling
Creeping down the hillsides, rolling through dark vales
Seeking the sparks that flew as the hammer pounded every aeon
Scimitar, Dagger, Sword, Kris, Rapier, Sabre, Katana they called it
A weapon of many  names and styles

The Book of Fate they claim was written in the ages lost
When Death was just a man, with a dagger in his hand
And when the stars came out at night to show the path
Pages and scrolls, ink and quill
Decorated the papery papyrus with glyphs to tell us thus
With blood and iron they saw, felt, and warred
A cimmerian ever winter to freeze the story in time
Burn it's tale into the past and the future by desert days
Book, Scroll, Codex, Lexicon, Tome, Volume, they named it
A feast of knowledge for the learned to become wiser

A sword of mercy and a book of malevolence
Created in harmony to fight the battles of men
Against themselves they fought, wont to fall to weakness
Jealousy, Greed, Anger, Wiles, Dishonesty
Ruled them as a king does his people
But instead of a empyrean rex they received an avaricious gerent
Bound to the perfidious and the olid with pollyanna ideas
Hope left to be a lingering pain, with scores of ****** marks in its trail
A cost none should bear on their backs or minds
Yet they are herded as sheep to pens to sleep

Dragons they whispered, mystical fire and wishes turned black
Scales to survive the hottest embers and the coldest nightmares
With tails ending in barbed spikes, ready to beat back an enemy
And eyes that of which froze anyone who looked in
With a fear stricken stone toss they claimed their prey
Lain out in front of them bare to see
These are their stories past, of bloodshed and tears
They do not speak of the times
When with a swish, they killed a murderer and his men
Or when a single tear was shed from a beast that could not feel
As a boy died, fallen from arrows deep in his heart

Lining the courtyard of lies, rowan trees stood proud
Weathering every storm to this seasoned moment
Though lightning stripped away their shield, raking them barren
The ronïn never failed to appear at every fortnight's breath
Constant in their chaotic world of bloodletting
All to be ardent men of the watchers
Those who gave warning to the flying devils
A sword does not lie, but a book will hide it's lies in sweet paradises
Pick up a sword, call it home, and travel the isles without fear
Have the falchion to bear weight of words
Do not break it upon backs and minds, but into skin and scars
They do not fade like hearts and minds do
Dust and Decay, Fire and Ash, Storms and Skies
Cinders that never go out, voices that never diminish
These are the tools that must be used to conquer
Locked away in the dragon, a beast to tame

Wild and spirited does not cover the roaming creatures of this land
It only gives a brief concept of a larger idea to spin the story along
The truth of their frightening brevity unlocks all doors
Releasing all kinds of torment, of the tortured
Heads will haze over, mystified and lost in the fog they cannot see
And when the dragon do return at last
They'll find their jailors asleep in their beds with a dagger in hand
Fire flickering, dancing in eyes darkened by men
They'll meet them in the morning as the sun rises

By fall of the moon life will have drained out of somebody
Whether which beast it was that lays slain
Cannot be sought after as a prize or treasure
Smaragdine forests and grey fortresses dot the terrain
A token of the liberty taken
A Book of Fate, a Sword of Mercy
A Dragon of Tranquility, a Death of Ignorance
Affinity is the nomenclature, revealed to be the final key to the carven stone

With an Affinity for steel raze the cities
And with Affinity for books plunder the minds
But with an Affinity for choice can one find the truths in the lies and blood in the body
A fate to be forgotten and a falchion to be made yet
This story only begins as the words come to an end
With a dragon's Affinity for knowledge
And the man's affinity for stolidity