Hey kid, you've been dead a few weeks and I'd just like to say hello. The ground has its first December coat of fragile snow over your dead body and I know you can't feel the cold but I'll tell you right now, I can see my frozen toes, just barely move them, breathe up into the sky, Id be lying if I said I still cry every day. But, I'm lying to myself if I said that I'm not trying to take back your pain every day in a way that won't make your heart start beating again.

I wonder if those butterflies ever drank up the nectar from your blood, probed their soft tongues into the velvet of your cuts, those razor blade ribbons, oh holy romantic, how you bleed like Mozart and bleed like ballads of classic rock stars, how they whip your face with sour sweat and drugs and drugs and drugs until you find yourself half asleep, brain swept under the rug.

Did you know only 1.5% of drug overdose related suicide attempts are successful? Beautiful blonde martyr for an ugly catholic high school in an ugly state in the ugliest of its hearts, how does it feel to be 1 in 100? How does it feel to be a rarity, carbon pressed into diamond? How does it feel to be cry for a week, left in the grass to roll like waves, buried without a name and a face and a grave?

In the latest of solemn sleep deprived nights I press my ear to the chest of the 100th depressed boy I come across and don't feel Vicodin climbing up his arteries, don't feel Klonopin, OxyContin, Ibuprofen. I can't seem to find the one, who knows, maybe you were it and all my efforts really were wasted. All those nights I've stayed up late did nothing. All those knives I stole, all that blood I wiped away with t-shirt sleeves, all the blankets I've put around stupid shaking shoulders, all the bittersweet will this be the last time your skin is this warm hugs, God did they mean nothing at all?

I lock my jaw into a permanent silence, buy back time by putting my money where your knife is. I take bets on when someone will die next. I read the label on every bottle of Xanax. I roll over in my bed again and again, and try to put you to rest again.

Amen.

i'm  sorry you fell in love with a void
a pit of desperation
and anxious tendencies
that you'll never get all the answers
and probably be left with a broken heart
but that's all i'm good for

you promised everything would be ok
but its been almost 5 years
and my life is still a wreck

I have a million scars
They all tell a different story
Some are small futile attempts at relief
Almost unnoticeable
but there all the same
They speak of desperate anxiety and release

Others are wide, gleaming red
Undeniably severe
Calling attention
To a mind once unwound
An attempt to destroy myself

Every scar is intimate
But up for honest inquiry
Of a genuine nature
An innocent curiosity
I will tell you about the scars
If you know how to ask

I want to be a happy person
In a life prescribed by fairy tale
I want to sing out in faith, fall in love, dance until midnight
Surround myself in a golden haze
And to feel only the basest joy and sadness
And never think about the end of my days

But I can only long for that life
For it is barred from me, permanently
I have met Chance and
Death
And they have whispered to me
Words of unspeakable tyranny

The trade of happiness for knowledge is enough to make you want to die, my dear

I cry now at sunlight and stream
Lost in silent, silver tears
There is such beauty here

What would you give up for what was promised in a dream?
Life itself?
If you could, would you undo what has been done?

I want to be a happy person
Yet the world has run into my arms full force
I cannot help but cradle it gently
And softly sing my hopes in its ear

I whisper a lullaby
to give away the peace I will never again hold as my own.

Is this what being an adult is?

Staring at objects and them staring back at you
Thinking only that you don't know if you have enough energy left
To put that away, do this, do that

But, somehow, doing it anyway
Because otherwise you know nothing will ever get done

Because it is only you here, by yourself

Is this what being an adult is?
Being too tired to weave feelings into poems
And so listing thoughts out in hollow fashion

Just so you can get to sleep

She stood at the edge of the world collapsing
And watched as he turned and fled
Pushing back what shadows he could
But he is one boy and a guitar
And there is not much he can do
To keep them all from rushing through
The border that is no longer

She knows she has caused this
Caused the shadows to twist from his control
As she led herself off the path
And imagined his shadows her own
But they belong to no one really

I'm sorry she cries out into the wind
Watching the cracks of light that splinter into his side

I didn't mean to break what you had
She hesitates
Watching him fight to hold the shadows back
To protect the sun he's long since left
And she's swept away by a rush of love
Even though in the air she can taste the tang of his own hate for himself

She runs without a second thought after him
Her feet dancing a web of lights into the ground

Play a song for me she calls out

Light to dark, love to hate, star to space

What do they mean without the other?
Maybe fences are always destined to fall

She reaches a hand out for the boy and points to the stars...

At the edge of a flower field, a girl hangs on the white picket fence that
separates her from the other side
She rests her chin in her hand, and watches
As shadows are summoned and twisted to shape
Anxiously searching for the silhouette
Of the boy who walks fearlessly among them

She doesn't know him per se
But she can't help feeling the fear he seems to not

He is the boy who breeds the shadows
And he must have some secret to controlling the dark that she does not know
Is it the song? she wonders
That he plays out night after night, note for note?

Because she has always know the dark to have teeth
And surely anyone who spends so much time with shadows
is bound to be bit

It's wishful thinking
to assume any stance of control
Yet that is what the boy who breeds shadows has done

She strains her eyes into the twilight of the other side
And her shoulders sag in relief as his outline comes into sight

How does he do this, night after night? she marvels

The sunlight gets brighter behind her, so bright it blinds her from inside and turns her side of the fence into a stage, in which the curtain is up and the show must go on.

I know, I know, I have a job to do. I'm coming, she sighs.

Bye, she whispers over the fence to the boy who can't hear her and the shadows that  swallow up the space between them.

She picks up her smile and turns to put on her performance, but her mind is still with the boy who breeds shadows.

*How does he do it?