Poets.
Ha!
We’re crazy!
Crazy, convoluted, and confused.

I’m a poet.
Yep!
I’m crazy!
My head is so full of random ideas,
So full of thinks that have never been heard,
Thoughts that have never been put into words.

You’re a poet?
Of course you’re crazy!
You write with a depth that cannot be measured
So deep you can’t see the bottom.

Oh, poets.
Yes, we’re crazy!
We’re crazy, convoluted, and confused.

As poets,
Yes, we know we’re crazy
And random and misunderstood

Hey, poets.
Embrace the crazy!
We’re crazy and crazy is good.

A gift from the sun
Golden rays of heat and warmth
Shine down upon us

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?

Rivers aren’t meant to be confined
They’re meant to flow, undefied

Rivers aren’t meant to be roped and chained
To one path, one divot, only meant to catch rain

Rivers aren’t meant to be encased in stone
Until their city is gone and they’re left alone

Rivers shouldn't be defiled by people’s ugly vices
They’re meant to be innocent, not unimportant sacrifices

Rivers are meant to flow freely, uninterrupted,
But we seem to be determined to make all of them corrupted

You, long ago, sutured the holes in your heart
with twine you braided from you own hair, you
dried your eyes on the soft part of your wrist and promised
that saltwater and daydreams would be the only things
you’d touch it with.

Trying to iron the wrinkles out of your skin has never worked before
and it won’t work now,
you know that,
but you have a steamer in your hand and a breach in your stitches,
so maybe it won’t be that way this time.

Emptiness is the only way you know how to be.
Or, maybe,
you thought you’d finally closed the hole
only to find that it was a shoddy job at best
and an act of sabotage at worse.

You know who the saboteur is. Don’t you?

The lump in your throat goes supernova, stealing
your breath.
Why can’t it take everything else, too?
You used to say you never cried but now there’s an ocean in your eyes
and sea levels are rising,

You are a mish-mash of messed up, mixed up metaphors and
whipstitches that are losing their stick,
rip them off one by one and see what happens,
but don’t you dare act surprised
when you don’t find anything inside.

Can you even bleed anymore? Answer honestly.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again
and expecting different results.”
Einstein said that.
Well, you say he was wrong.

You know that’s not true. But you don’t know anything anymore, do you?

She wore stilts to seem on top of the world
She wore long sleeves to hide her insecurities
She wore a mask to hide her face
And kept her hair long to hide the line
Where plastic met skin

When she takes it all off she sees someone she knows
And realizes how much she envies her stranger
So she tries to become them again,
But she can’t get escape from the way the mask makes it hard to see,
From the way the stilts stab the soles of her feet
From the way the skintight clothes won’t let her breathe.

She
Can’t
Breathe

So she suffocates to please the people she hates,
Saying things like,
“When I’m skinny enough,
When I’m popular enough,
When I’m good enough,
I’ll stop.”
But she is never good enough for the one person she hates the most.

She hides her paper as she confesses her loathing
So that no one can see her graphite tears.
She wants someone to ask “Are you okay?”
So that she can cry to someone other than the journals she’s been documenting her self-destruction on for months.
But of course,
When someone does ask,
She puts on her mask and says,
“I’m fine.”

Like specks of broken ice
Dancing ‘cross the sky-
Soft as the music
of a flute floating by-
As lovely as jewels
Hung up in pride,
Stars hypnotize
With sparkling eyes.
Like the moon in the water,
you can’t look away
Sleep soundly at night,
stars are gone by your wake.
As curious as a sly fox,
who always seems to slip away,
stars are mysteries,
Best left unsolved, anyway

Summer friends share watermelon slices
while the water laps the shore,
while sea-salt air dries on their lips.

And both of them think that “Days
like these, with salt and sugar on our lips,
make for the best kinds of kisses.”

So summer friends share watermelon slices
while they dance in the sand, and
around each other just enough, and too much.

And both of them think that “this day is almost
perfect - and it would be if she were
holding me.”

When summer friends run out of watermelon slices,
they lay on the beach,
quietly wishing and wanting.

And both of them think that “I wish
she looked at me the way she’s looking at those clouds.”
With their fingertips inches apart.

Summer friends lay amongst watermelon rinds
while water laps the shore,
while sea-salt air dries on their lips

And both of them think that-

Both of them say that
“I love you.”

The voice of an angel,
that is sunset.
Clouds dancing with the sky,
that is sunset.
Nothing touchable by man,
that is sunset
sweet, completely pure,
that is sunset

A lover of music,
is my sunset.
A life full of friends,
is my sunset.
Never judging,
always loving.
That is my sunset.

What is yours?

I would tell you that your smile shines
like sunrise in the east.
But alas, they just cannot compare
When you shine twice as bright, at least.

Sometimes it feels like the world is doing its best to crush me.
Like it’s trying to squeeze the tears out of my eyes,
Or take away all the air from around me and leave me alone to suffocate.

Sometimes it feels like everyone’s problems are suddenly mine.
Like it’s up to me to fix everything,
And placing one foot wrong could make everything fall apart.

Whenever I feel like the world’s gone out of it’s way to shove me over the edge of a cliff
Just to see how well I can swim, I go to you.
You bring me up for air, my life preserver.

Thank you.

Sometimes I want to scream
The days have sharpened their claws only to rip at my heart,
And when they’re done, they leave it alone to bleed

Some days I feel like I ruin everything I touch
And people laugh because they think it’s funny,
So I laugh along with them, because what else am I supposed to do?

Whenever I feel like I’m about to break,
You step in with a hug and a roll of tape,
To fix me where I’m cracking.

Thank you.

You are the cast that’s wrapped itself around my life,
Holding me tightly so that I can start to heal.

You are the message,
The joke,
The lilting laughter that lifts me up and up,
Into the clouds
And away from the Earth.

We left my lead shoes stuck in the mud.
Good.
They were only making me heavier.
But you let me float.


And so we fly away
Hand in hand
Our heads in the clouds
Because that’s where we belong.

Thank you.

My face is caked
With pigment, baked
In glaring lights, and I,
Can't wait.

My stomach churns,
Adrenaline
Is coursing through my veins,
but then

"5 minutes!"
Someone shouts, my head
perks up immeditely
And when

They beckon fervently
For me
And I cannot contain
My glee

Step out onto polished wood
Look out into the aisles
See faces staring up at you,
You're here to make them smile

I have the power to make them laugh,
To make them shout or cry,
And my nervousness is gone now that
I know their hearts are mine.

When I look into your eyes,
What do I see?
Dark and light,
Black and white.
Shadows that spiral into the depths
Of darkness
Fear?
Solitude?
Sadness?
Your expression is unreadable,
But it stirs something inside me.
The battle between dark and light
Is mesmerizing.
I cannot look away.

This morning I looked out my window
And saw a biker biking by
I thought to myself, “Where’s she going?
When is she getting there? And why?”

Maybe she’s riding her bike to school,
She did look very young.
17, 18, 19 even,
But not quite 21.

Maybe she’s riding her bike to work,
Because she doesn’t have a car.
It would be easier to bike
If her work is very far.

Maybe the ******* the bike is riding
All the way back home
It’s funny to think that the ******* the bike
Won’t know about her poem.

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.

I think too much.
I care too deeply.
I text too often.
I laugh too hard,
For fear of them having to fret
As much I do.
Such is the nature of a worrier.

This sentence is false.
Now, if this sentence were to be false,
Then it would be true.
If it were to be true,
Then it would be false
Truly, this sentence is false.
False, this sentence is true.
You can ponder it
And ponder it
For the rest of your life,
But at the end of your life,
It will ring no more true,
And it will read no more false.

Will it do withers or wonders?
Life, or the end?
Find a great opportunity,
a foe, or a friend.
it can knock down mountains,
It can close any door
It can topple our strongest,
and many, many more.
Time will continue,
till nothing remains,
The smartest, the brightest,
The small or insane
Take it to mind,
Just where it began,
On the beach of the world,
you are one grain of san

Today I wrote a poem
It took me five minutes
It was short,
A little choppy,
And pretty irrational,
But people really seemed to like it.
It got so many comments
And an encouraging amount of favorites.

So I decided to write another one.

This one took me two days
I poured my heart and soul into it,
And then set it free to start it’s life of internet fame
Only this time,
The poem got two likes
And no comments.

I guess people don’t like looking at my soul
That’s okay.
I’ll keep putting it on display anyway
Because maybe someone will like it
And then maybe they’ll comment on it

I don’t like waiting, but I will
Because I know that souls are hard to look at
When I take five minutes
To jot down a thought,
It’s so simple
But my heart and soul are much more complicated.

So take your time
Like it or don’t
But I’ll be happy, because
The most genuine form of writing is when you write to yourself.

What makes a poet?
A poet is not a writer.
No, a poet is a composer
A poet is an artist
A poet creates masterpieces without paint
A poet creates songs without music

Poets can find meaning in anything
Poets can make the most overused things original
Poets can pull emotions from the depths of their minds
And put them on a page

A poem is made of a complicated simplicity
A poem is a silent melody
A poem is a persona
Immortalized in words

In first grade,
Gay was just a word.
We didn’t know what it meant.
We just knew that boys and girls liked each other.
And that was fine with me,
Because as far as I knew, that was all I was.

In second grade,
There was a boy,
Who said he had two mothers.
I didn’t understand why,
But through all the scenarios I pondered
It never crossed my mind that maybe
They loved each other.

In third grade,
Gay was weird, unheard of.
My classmates said it was wrong.
I would get upset, and when I asked them why,
Why it was wrong to love the way you were born to,
They answered with cop-outs and stammers.
It made me feel satisfied.

In fifth grade,
Gay was… fine…  
but still, nobody really understood.
Boys still liked girls,
And girls still liked boys,
Just like it had been since grade one.

The questions started
In sixth grade,
When I met a girl, who quickly became my best friend.
She was beautiful.
I would imagine her kissing me,
Smiling at me, holding my hand,
And I liked it.
‘But,’ I would ask myself, ‘I am still straight, aren’t I?”

Because that’s what I’d been my whole life.
I'd liked boys.


At the time,
These feelings didn’t bring me shame or fear,
But instead, questions and opportunity,
It was new thing about myself to explore,
And I was excited!

But.

Instead of a new era of excitement,
And exploration,
I got a kick in the stomach from an antagonizer named Reality.

I told two people that I’d liked a girl.
One friend I trusted, and one classmate I hardly knew.
That classmate told two more people,
and one of them stopped me in the classroom on our way back from lunch, saying,
“Is it true? That you’re…”
She didn't finish, but I knew what she had meant to say.
I told her yes.
She made a disgusted face and walked away.

That day I went home crying.
For the rest of the year,
That girl’s younger brother would stop me on my way to the buses every day and tell me,
“People are saying that you’re a lesbian.”
And at the time, it hurt.
Because in sixth grade, gay was an insult.

In seventh grade, I didn't talk about my sexuality.
The feelings for my friend had faded,
And I could be straight again.
I swooned over boys with all the other girls,
Thinking that I'd just gone through a phase.

That summer,
I moved away.
Away from everything and everyone I'd ever known.
Waves of anxiety beat away whatever flimsy dam I'd built between me and my sexuality
And I was terrified.
The concept of being anything other than straight was crazy,
But at the same time,
I couldn't dismiss the feelings as a phase anymore.

I was confused.
I wanted an answer, so I gave myself false labels and told myself to live with it.
‘This is what you are. Just don't think about it.
Don't think about it, and maybe you'll be able to forget.’
I was never able to forget.

At that point, it wasn’t even the feelings that were the problem anymore.
It was the not knowing.
I wanted something to call myself
I needed a label.
But none of them fit me quite right.

In eighth grade,
The anxious waves calmed to simple tides.
I still had no label,
I still hadn't fallen for a girl since my best friend,
And I never, ever talked about it to anyone else,
But I had learned to control my thoughts a bit more.

One day, I'm talking online.
A girl posts on the chat,
Saying something about being gay.
I join the conversation eagerly.

Tentative to give a label to myself,
I don’t say outright who I am
Because I felt I would be lying no matter
What I said.

And in our DMs I threw out identities
That almost applied to me
But the great thing about digital faces
Is that their eyes don’t scathe.

And through our conversations
She taught me things that I’d never learned
Living in a monochromatic world,
Because she was the only one who was able to understand.

Now, I’d lived my whole life being told,
‘You are never alone,’
But I was never able to believe it.
Until this girl brought consolation to my isolation
And showed me that I wasn’t alone.
That there are so many others who understand.

Who understand what it feels like to question yourself,
To look at everything you’ve ever been told and think, “but that isn't me.”
People who understand what it's like to be confused
And scared,
Because the mold that forms the world
Wasn’t made for us.
They understand what it’s like
To live your life thinking that your shape is wrong.
“I should fit somewhere. Why can’t I fit?”

But she also taught me to be unapologetically myself
How to need no label but the one saying “me.”
How to take a knife,
And instead of using it to carve yourself into a different shape,
Use it to make a mold
That you can lay in comfortably.

And now I know.

I know that straight was never what I was supposed to be,
It’s just what I had seen my whole life

I’m not a cow that needs a tag punched through my ear, just because others want an explanation of who I am

There's no right way to be queer,
And right now, I'm doing great!

Gay is not an insult - now, if anything, I'll take it as a compliment!

I am not strange.
I am not abnormal.
I am not broken.

And I can finally love the way I was born to.

I am from black cats and silly smiles,
From senseless sisters and lazy Sundays
I am from coarse yellow grass
That brushes my legs and tickles my feet

I am from chlorine pools and fast flowing rivers
Sunny days and stinging nettles.
I am from tall trees and ripped jeans
Barbie band-aids and tireless energy.

I am from warm afternoons,
Bike rides and best friends,
Whole orchestras and squeaky recorders
I am from a place that is never silent
Pattering feet and clicking paws.
I am from snow days and sled rides,
Pillow forts and fragrant pines

I am from puppy dogs and Christmas gifts.
Spilled drinks and soaked towels.
Cool winter nights, curled up with a book,
Overstuffed sofas and Friday movie nights.

I am from daddy-longlegs
And chasing butterflies
Cicadas
Clinging to my shirt,
And caterpillars
Crawling up my arm.

I am from lemonade stands
And (I must admit) overpriced craft sales
Cozy blankets,
And widescreen TV’s.

I am from stories and pictures,
Scissors and glue,
Colossal messes and unstoppable laughter
Setting suns and shining stars
New days and new beginnings.

Memories I will forever cherish,
And new ones made every day.
Arguments,
Agreements,
Opposites,
And perfect matches.

Photographs that make me giggle,
Smile,
Cringe,
And remember.

My home is not a place.
I have made a home in my memories.
A place I can go whenever I want to smile.
I am from everywhere,
I am from anywhere,
And this is the place I call home.

I am a single voice.
A single voice in thousands.
How can I be heard
Over the clamor
Over the chaos
Over the turmoil
Of thousands of voices?
A spoken word
Can only say so much.
But the written word
Can say so much more.
They say a picture
Is worth a thousand words.
A poem
Is worth a million
A poem says what no one else can say,
And does what no one else can do.
A poem
Can reach
Beyond imagination,
To places in your heart,
Your mind,
Your being,
You didn’t know existed.
A poem
Can be anything

That is why I write.

They wring my neck like rubber, and it’s harmless,
They say, as I’m writhing on the ground,
Throat crushed,
Chest heaving,
Mouth a fountain dripping wine.

A testament to sins chosen by those
Never condemned
And though it isn’t fair,
There is a reason that they are not the ones
Dead on a cross

They would not die for our sins; no, they live for them.
And the wine we spill, from every artery, alcohol
Burning, turning
Our insides to rock,
They drink to have a good time.

To a God that isn’t there I pray while the others listen in,
And they whisper their pities,
But I have not asked them
and they cannot provide an answer to an question nonexistent
They can only wait, and watch

The day they find wine in pools on the dirt,
Perhaps they’ll find it in themselves to look up
And see that the face of that God,
The one to which I pray and to which they spit empty confessions,
Is not there,
Or perhaps just does not care

Perhaps they will fall to their knees as wine drips down their own chins,
Finally, finally they will understand what it means to bleed
Catching the wine in their hands as it run off my fingertips they cry,
Not because they wish for me to be whole again
But because they know I will linger.
A stain.
A testament to their unpardoned confessions,
Their plea for innocence where they deserve none.

Or perhaps,
They will take pleasure in knowing
That the nails they chose to drive into my hands finally cracked bone.

I wonder.
I wonder strange things.
I wonder things
That most people
Don’t bother wondering.

I wonder what.
What the lady on the corner,
Who I pass on the street,
Is thinking.
Is she dreaming?
Is she pondering?
Is she wondering, too?

I wonder how.
How did that child,
Who I see at the shop,
Get scrapes on her knee?
Did she fall?
Off a bike?
Out of a tree?

I wonder when.
When did the jet-lagged family,
Who I notice in the airport,
Get here?
Was it a long flight?

I wonder why.
Why do I wonder these things?
I know why.
Because I am wonderer.
Why?
I’ll let you wonder.

When it started, I felt butterflies flapping frantically in my chest
Whenever you spoke, whatever you said
And those sweet words that rolled off of your tongue,
Your voice light and loving and lilting with charm and candy-coated promises
And so on it went, weeks and words,
months and words,
Always the same words.
The butterflies grew tired of all the same words.
The air they flew in has grown stale
They’re off to find fresher skies now
And they’ll stop in to say hello, but only on days
When clouds, memories, bittersweet longing rolls through the sky.
But they don’t stay anymore. This isn’t their home, anymore.
They want a place where they can land on your fingertips, leaving their feathers on your palm,
Watching your face light up like the sun that always seems to be overcast, nowadays.
It’s not a lie to imagine if you never believed it could happen.
And so the air stays still,
And the clouds linger,
And all we have now is
Words.

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.