The girl with a dragon in her chest is always learning.
When she opens her mouth, snarls echo
Up her throat and rattle her teeth,
So she learns not to speak.

When she opens her heart the dragon burns the passerby, and you can only treat so much blistering flesh before your run out of gauze, so,
she learns not to share.

When she opens her mind the dragon laughs.
And she’s learned enough by now to know
how to fix it,
So she learns not to dream.

The girl with the dragon in her chest knows not her own strength,
Or maybe she does,
But she doesn’t want to remember it anymore.

I mean, breaking brittle bones is not pleasant for anyone, especially those who are constantly in casts, so,
She wraps her own wrists and waits, and
learns not to be strong.

Her breath comes in puffs of smoke, filling
The already dingy room with
A layer of dusky darkness,
So, she learns not to breathe.

The girl with the dragon in her chest has
no room for her lungs but
That’s fine, because she has a rib-cage
to hold the dragon and another cage to hold the flood.

The girl with the dragon in her chest is
boiling from the inside out, but,
She still takes hot showers and doesn’t
drink water because it’s hard to slay a dragon
When you’d have to cut yourself open to do it.

The other day I woke up with a breeze in my chest,
With my mind partly-cloudy
Sun peeking through the gray, and the forecast
Predicts sunnier weather to come.

The other day I stood up and blood rushed through my veins,
I drew a breath and expelled
The stale air, and then, I did it again.
I was breathing.

The other day I put one foot in front of the other, and
Instead of sending echoes up my spine, I felt
My footsteps thump on tile. In that moment,
I realized I was real.

The other day, the little storms in my cells dissipated, leaving
Dewdrops as goosebumps on my arms, a rainbow in my smile,
And head tilted towards the sky, I cried,
Because I’d forgotten how blissful it felt to be okay.

It’s so nice to see the sun again.

She is a hive full of
Sweetness.
But , never far from
the sting .

“I see you “ she smiles
as she touches my face .

Upstairs she lies
with coverlets and curtains.

I am searching
and searching.
But , for what
I’m not sure .

Maybe diamonds
but probably
Fireflies and Lace .

Working towards not
losing my shadow.

My inertia’s held
prisoner
to her beauty
my moral vision
called and questioned.
The death of leaves ,
stranded on the high wire
in the back of beyond.

She teeters on the cliffside,
She scans the ground below.
She searches the wind like a chapter book,
For what, she doesn’t know.

With one foot off the edge, she stands,
She looks around and sighs.
She thumbs through pages, slits her fingers,
Bleeds through ink and lies.

Tipping off the edge, she knows
She doesn’t have the guts
To live a life where she’s never free
From the sting of papercuts.

I live life on the end of a yo-yo string.

One moment high in the sky,
My strings neatly wrapped away where they can’t get tangled, where they can’t get beaten and battered and torn by open air,

The next moment spinning so fast I can’t tell what’s real, toes brushing puddles I come closer to with every swing, strings on display for the world to see until I can find it in me to wrap it all up again.
And I know that one day my strings will wear thin, they will snap, and I will sink.

One day, when I go down, I will not come back up.

Have I succeeded?
As I sit in the kitchen,
Surrounded by sensation and temptation,
Bread and milk and cheese and
Everything I’ve tried to leave
Behind and I don’t eat,
Sipping on the mug of tea in front of me,
Ignoring pangs of hunger, telling me
I can’t go on much longer...
Have I succeeded?