My nights are filled with nothing. No regrets, no mistakes, no happiness, or nostalgia, they are simply void. There are no sheep on my ceiling, so instead I count the boys I have passed time with. I meditate on their finger prints engraved in my mind- as if any of them had ever actually touched it. I follow their individual swirls to centres, to lips, and my own fingers comforting them, easing them, helping them forget. This is to the boys who I can remember, who I can separate from gropes and short dances. The boys who met my mouth with their eyes closed. I wonder if they think about the times? The encounters? Do they fluff our moments into their pillows, make room for our memories in their beds at night? Do they swallow instances like painkillers or stomp them out like cigarette butts? Do they even remember? Kissing me in the dark, squeezing their lust into my body in the morning frost? Rested heads against shoulders and wrapped arms around necks and waists? Does he remember my lips crashing against his after pulling off my shirt? Does he remember sifting through my chest like he was searching for my heart? Does he remember car headlights, streetlights, houselights, my lights- my eyes. Does he remember breaking me, remember filling my gaps, remember numbing me with his needle fingers, and does he remember warming me to another life? Do they think, do they realize their words and their touches were the air in my balloon? But there are a lot of hims, just as I'm sure there is a million mes but do they recall, do they think about me? To the boys I have lent myself to, thank you. When insomnia kisses me I know it is empty, I know I am empty, and we are just helping each other survive another nothing night.

Breathing is not an option here,
Pressed against windows to fill
The cracks:
Don't let the water in.

The streets are flooding.

Find higher ground,
Ink bleeds down pages scarred
With words:
Save yourselves.

The streets are flooding.

Home groans against the pressure,
Begging to break and snap with
Powerless moans:
Don't succumb.

The streets are flooding.

"Find higher ground!" I scream,
They glare at me for disrupting
Their silence:
They won't hear me.

The streets are flooding.

The sound pools in my ears,
I used to collect rain drops in
Clay pots:
I want to rush the waves.

The streets are flooding.

I am too scared of heights to climb,
The glass is fogging I am trying
To breathe:
Open the gates.

I am flooding.

there are many ways to fail
and few ways to succeed.
he tried,
we failed,
we'll succeed with other people.

when she says she is empty,
she is not asking to be filled.
stretch her thin and you will see
gold
peeking through her worn body.
stretch her thin and you feel her
fire
burning what you hold.
do not hold her.
when she says she is numb,
she is not asking to feel something.
do not wait out her novocaine
mood
drooling down her chin.
do not wait out her novocaine
high
she is elated.
do not bring her down.
she is a bookmark holding someone else's place:
do not move her.
someone left her,
waiting,
she does not know the other side:
that does not mean you show her.
someday she will be fire.
she will dry all that she has soaked with her
ravine heart.
you will follow her black markings to something
gold
she will be followed.
do not be surprised when she does not moan,
she will not moan,
she does not feel.
she is still ice.
when she says she is ice
do not try to melt her.
she will be fire.

Why did you do it?
How do you feel?
Okay, but is it the daddy issues?
Regret isn't always instant, ya know?
Eventually, i will explode.
so i'm not what, sorry who, you wanted. maybe even needed. what is the difference. turn me over and get your kicks, did you think it was your eyes i wanted to see when i opened my own? you are nobody. not to me anyways. i wish you had blinded me: maybe i would have felt more. more than the voices. felt the music over your moans - that by the way sounded like you wanted me. felt what it was to be whole, full, content. everyday something feels like it does not belong in me and you were no exception. when you breathed into my neck it was no cold biting breeze but the memory of moments before my dog threw up in my lap - at least he looked apologetic. but i let you take it and now it's yours and that is fine by me but you have this problem where you don't know when to close your mouth and maybe if you had ever put it to use i could forgive you. insult me. please. you don't know how good it feels to have my worthlessness validated by a stranger. someone who doesn't understand my jokes and my biting comments: alienates my tongue and forces it back into hiding. the moment i felt a crack following the path your fingers had once whispered into my skin: i felt home. back to base one. back to being an infant learning how to operate these strange extensions of my body - which brought me back to you, who taught you to use those fingers? i wonder if you can hold a fork, is it crooked? the moment you couldn't peel a tangerine i should have known better. speaking of, i know i do. and i want to say it wasn't what you did or didn't do but there was a lot you skipped over. i can see you're impatient, impolite, even impotent on occasion and i have to ask: how do you support yourself on such shaky arms? i truly didn't think you'd make it through the whole, what was it, 15 (?) minutes. and what did you want? a prize? a pat on the back? for ******* and spewing your loneliness into me? lips too big, neck too long, decision making skills nonexistent, looked like your last girlfriend - did I miss anything else that was wrong? did my catholicism make it better? did that help you mount the white steed, you were no prince charming and the dragon was better company. did it hurt me, to be rejected that is, only about as much ***** as it took to laugh about it. does it haunt me? like every mistake i have ever made: but it's no big deal, you're bottom of the pile. that should please you, you couldn't hold yourself on top anyways.

I was a stranger to closeness. To entangled arms and whispered conversations. To tracing lines in my palms like a map, to fingers drawing down my back. Exposed but not uncomfortable. I had never been held. And the thought bewildered me as I realized that my companion thus far was loneliness. Loneliness like a pill I could not swallow so I learned to breath around and wait out. How do I explain this loneliness? It gutted me until empty was normal and the dull ache was a regular occurrence. Like the desperate need to cry out all the water lingering in my body but having nothing to give. Shaking and fighting against the vile feeling in my throat that would never move. I was accustomed to loneliness but how could I not be when I'd never been held, or touched, or felt like I was worthy of love? I blamed my body, adopted silence, fuelled with anger as time passed and I waited, I waited, I waited, and waited - for nothing.
Nothing could ease what I had never known but somehow always desired. And here it was, real, and it felt right, why would I say no to the feeling I begged to taste. It didn't leave my tongue numb, it didn't let me down. It wasn't what they told me it would be. It didn't feel like I was giving anything away. It felt like being held, being whole, my numbness subsided as I just felt. Felt my loneliness melt away, felt my skin being brushed and caressed, not loved but not alone. It wasn't beautiful but it was more than I had before and I clung to it until I couldn't anymore and in my car the loneliness buckled itself in and I drive it home where it helped me wash my face clean and wrapped itself around me like my blankets as I caved into the hollowness of its home. I realized I don't have to drown with my anchor heavy heart. I could find closeness in a stranger.

How long will it take her to understand that your blood is laced with loneliness?
That the smoke staining her tongue cannot subdue the angry taste of your mouth?
That the hands that hold her neck want to strangle the air encased under skin
and no song
or word
or feeling
can dilute you.
why did I wish you cared enough to **** the life out of me?
Why I wasn't enough to ****.
You play with my insecurities like kittens,
laughing at how they can't jump high enough
teasing with what's just out of reach,
I was a mouse weaving through the holes
I thought
I had gnawed in you
but your hands stopped me in my place:
put me in my place.
I am nothing but a comfort when the weight of the world
lands on your chest,
I'm your oxygen mask
as the plane starts to crash
and you swore up and down you loved me
but years have made it clear you don't know what that means.
Your words are an empty void
I would gravitate towards them,
let myself get ****** in
you told me I'm different
that you didn't want to hurt me
though years of pain beg to differ.
I should have called you puppet master  
instead I called you dear
and I have realized I deserve better,
that I don't have any more years to give you,
but I still craved your attention
and your jealousy
as though I could teach you love and how to feel it right.
But at 16 I had you figured out;
you've only regressed since then.
and I should be used to people letting me down;
etching their names in my heart as a reminder
but you were supposed to be the cure.
The end to my self imposed suffering.
You bring no good to me,
trap me in the light of the child I used to be,
and your name haunted my lips like the last time you
kissed
me
but none of this would ease how I wanted you to hurt me.
Prove you cared with your actions.
Your words are white noise.
I need to focus on the swollen melody my heart is performing.
But how do I find closure,
To what will always feel