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

It's almost funny how things change. How surprised I am that no matter how stuck in the past I tend to be life around me still moves on, it's like my heart beats backwards while time ticks forward. My heart beats rapidly, knowing where I was going before I recognized the turns I was taking. I'm a sucker for memories and I came here to try and breathe like I used to be able to do but it's different. The snow has melted much like who I used to be and there are no deep conversations just a half moon and a lit up skyline. I want to lean against the rails and remember the ghost of somebody who pressed me up against them but much like him they're gone. They were thrown away like our time together. I remember walking along the edge to overlook the chunks of ice thinking maybe if I fell onto one of them they'd take me somewhere better, now I'm too scared to climb up. How many calories would I burn falling into the lapping waves and fighting to not drown in them? Not enough. Never enough. And I want to say that's not the point but it is. I can't see a forward so I walk backwards and retrace the steps to who I used to be and it brings me back to sickness and I don't want to fight it because pills have to be taken with food and I don't eat enough to fit them into my life. This is what I've become, or its who I've always been. All I can think about is how alone I am and will be and I'm over the moon that soon I'll have everyone I love with me again, it tears me apart to think of when they leave, leave me to figure out if I'm more than any alibi I've ever shown. I'm trapped and I chose this for myself but that doesn't make it hurt any less. It was a self fulfilling prophecy, I wanted to escape who I've been but she catches up with me every time I cry in the parking lot I used to feel so alive in, every time I hear about self inflicted wounds I remember the feeling of my own and I wish they were there again to remind me I'm human and I should treat myself as such. But I'm empty, as empty as the railing that doesn't recognize me as empty as the ice less water and as empty as a plate of food. I'm not sick I'm stuck and I don't want help my Astoria will claim me and when it does I'll claw my way out because I'm a fighter and no matter what I've been through I've always proved that. My mother told me I always play the victim when I try to tell her how I feel and I let her have that. The only victim I've ever been is a victim of myself, of my mind and my heart and I'd dare say my soul if I thought I had one. There's no philosopher in the world who can save me now and no person who thinks to. I don't want to be saved, I just want to feel alive. And some days I do but today I don't. Right now I just want to close my eyes and remember things my brain has let disappear, I want to make something out of nothing and tell someone how I feel without thinking I'm being too much trouble or drawing attention to myself. I want to be alive again but I let such little things **** me slowly and its up to me. Always up to me.

I'm running from darkness
She is avoiding the light
She is closing her blinds
I'm escaping the night
I can never fall asleep
She can never know
She's not broken like I am
If I give in I go
Sometimes the black lasts hours
Sometimes it lasts for days
She wishes she was asleep
To get over all the pain
She is ultraviolet
Keeping me awake
She is everything
The victim of every mistake I make
She always drives me crazy
But I need her all the same
She seems to really love me
But can't make the claim
I'll want her forever
Love her til my walls are blue
She is where my mind wanders
Her eyes are the best Indiana view.

He isn't much yet but he could be anything he wants, he's just a tennis ball waiting to be bounced into the world and caught in the arms of those who whisper coos to him though he can't hear. He could be anything. He could be a she and she could be into writing like me or forging paths or acting. It's too soon to tell but it's never too soon to imagine and when I saw the results I could see her, blue eyes, brown hair, beautiful. More beautiful than anything that's ever existed. In the dimples and the gangly limbs, I've never met it and I would do anything for it. For this baby. I want it to be safe and never worry about the bad things in the world I feel like I need to chase out the dark minded people to create space for all the good this baby will do, because she's capable of doing so much good. And so is he if that's what he chooses to be and that would be fine with me. I'd teach him the fragility of his heart and how he must handle those he desires with care, I'd teach him to not let anyone walk over him but to never directly hurt another person. I'd show him pictures of the adventures he missed out on and read him whatever book he wants how ever many times he wants to hear it, I'll teach him you are my sunshine, the wheels on the bus, and every backstreet boy song so he never feels behind. I'd help him grow and be his support until he can stand on his own but even then I would stay close by. This heart inside my chest has never been mine to own completely, it was meant to be shared and he can have it all because there's nothing I wouldn't do for him. For her. For it. For this baby. To say I'm scared is an understatement, but this love is undeniably existent flushing through my body like its electricity shivering through my veins, my heart has never pounded so hard, my eyes have never been so wet as when I knew for sure its here, but I've never felt more alive and strong and pure either. You're good, and you're loved, and I pray you never feel empty. You will forget but I will remind you that life is hard but you are blessed and everything will be okay. At the very least, in the worst of times I will always make sure you will be okay.

I refuse to write a poem about you. I fear the day my emotions get the best of me, leave me with searing fingertips and sword like pen stabbing holes in your perfection. I never want to cut through your life and dissect your soul. I never want to write about the way you smile and that one face you make - no. I don't want to recreate your hands with words that bring me comfort because I can never replace the feeling of them. I can't write about the way I look at you, or the way my heart pounds for you, or the music that reminds me of you. I don't want to admit how I pine for you, admire you, sit in my car, drive by you how just a glimpse of you makes me high on you. I can't write about how you're the exception to my confidence how you scare me in the most thrilling kind of way. I never want to admit conversations that run through my head, the drunken memories that come to mind when I need a distraction or they demand to be remembered. I cannot write about you and all your beautiful parts I can't talk about pain in an unreturned heart - I refuse to write a poem about you. My words would never live up to your truth and I'd rather have you than a poem that would never do you justice.

I feel as though I am a slave to destruction, knees nailed to rickety floorboards that creak against creation. I am head bowed, pleading for pleasure against the cacophony of the ******, washing white floors with grime. I am the harbinger of ends, an omen of unhappiness. I am question marks, red streaks, spilled coffee on loved words. I am torment, tormented by the ways I’ve been tormenting the things I love. I am oceans inviting and striking with no warning, hurricanes gently shaking before swallowing and devastating, promise land offering refuge and whiting out identities because nobody gets to be free. I am shackled to remorse, self hatred, anxiety. A prisoner of pain, daughter of broken glass, born in spider breaks, marked by shards and splinters. I am the whisper of ruin rattled through crows calling home across worlds and realms. I am jutted bones cutting into flesh collecting blood for breakfast and sorrow for supper, feeding famine to families I am familiarly unfamiliar with. I am cast away, fallen angel, victim to the rise of hope and sequestered from safety. Left to forage fight in fields long forgotten, to discover decades of indecency and be punished by punishing the lucky ones. The thinned wrist souls slipping from restraints, to make commodity of clear consciouses, and deliver doom promised by our ancestors. I am an agent of misery, a companion of karma, nothing more than a slave to destruction.

He is screaming with frustration,
throwing objects like fits,
trying to contain his shrills but they
break through in shrieks
so I hold him.
He grumbles and growls wanting me
to leave. I just rub his back.
Slow circles; with my other arm
wrapped around him
like he is still a child.
I remind him to breathe
and tell him to try again tomorrow
and he huffs
but I can feel him releasing his anger
relaxing.
The tension in his body dissipating
until he is ready for me to
let go.
He picks up broken pieces
from the floor
tries to put them back together
the best he can  
I leave him to do this.
He never questioned my fear of the dark
when I would sneak away at night,
he eagerly awaited to hear my stories
and would hug me
no matter how hard I pushed him
away.
This is a love that can withstand
fights for the mirror
battles over school.
He is ever changing,
becoming someone new everyday
but when I hold him
he is still five
and braver than I.
He is stronger and kinder.
When I was his age
he could not understand
why I would cry in the other room
and bite at the ankles of anyone
who dared to step too close.
But I understand him.
The anger that lingers beneath skin
always ready to consume
and dominate.
This household is like
a pack of matches  
once he ignites he is forgotten
because we all burn up and out
without listening to his pain.
I remember that feeling,
it never fully goes away.
It is not something we speak of
but something we feel
and when he needs me to hold him
I will never be too far.
He has my ears,
my arms,
and always
my heart.

I do not believe I could ever love anyone enough to make them my home. My home will always be red dirt and oak trees under the best sunsets in the entire sky with potato patches and country dirt roads, fumbling through sticky tourists on steamy days and letting the salt water feed my skin on the beach I spent all my summers at. My home will always be raspberry cordial and late nights in lovers lane with Canada days in crowded parks and childhood pictures with cannons, my home will always be drunken sidewalks and midnight Chinese, dancing in my drive way and smoking on my back porch. I could never make home in a person enough to follow them away from the place I love...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Could you stay a while longer?

Your chest against my chest, your ear to my heart, in silence and syrupy breath? Hold on to my wrists, rest your lips on my neck: "the world is quiet here". It is ours here. There is nothing but your eyes, nothing but your skin, nothing but intimacy. The right kind of intimacy. The kind of closeness that makes me want, need, to pull you closer until you can not be any closer and you are still not close enough.

Don't leave me.

Please,

don't hurt me.

Sing me to sleep. I just want to sleep underneath the weight of the feelings that make my heart feel like it is sinking, losing itself to you. I want to be lost to you, and these feelings, and these blue patterned sheets but reality ****** my fingers until I'm clawing at your back like you're going to escape me.

I don't want to talk about how scared I am.

You will leave me.

Stare at me so I can memorize your eyes for when the day comes. Right now I just want to be with you.

Could you stay a while longer?

Tell me why I see him, why I dream of him and wake up longing. Analyze why I can feel him in my unconscious and not cringe, why he doesn't provoke my paralysis or night terrors. That's why I'm here anyways, I need to be fixed. My brain must be broken, cracked down the middle like glass splinters that allow him to seep into my sleep like a lullaby. Get rid of him as I have done in my waking state. I no longer want to dream fondly of his mother or drive down the royal road in his car. Interpret why I take rest to the memories of us laughing and drink him like wine until claimed by sheets. That's your job. Hypnotize me, convince me he never existed, or to forget the way his face looks at least: remind me why he made me scream and cry when he never get his way or how empty I would feel when he talked about the things he loved and I was never one. Show me how to cope, teach me to control my unconscious so I can choose to not see him, so I can turn my back on him before he does me. Exterminate him from my mind, tell me I am crazy, prescribe me pills or send me away, shock me with as many bolts as it takes until the bruises on my leg stop reminding me of his hands, until I forget who he is awake and asleep, lobotomize me if you must because it hurts! It really ******* hurts. Tell me why I was given a heart if it was to be broken, a life if it was to be wasted, a body if it was to never be loved. But that's not your job. So please, just help me sleep.

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.

Loving me is like a cold front. I am scared of fire I can not control and you burn too hot for me. I can not see through your smoke and I am choking on your promises but it is my own fault because I let you think I was a volcano when I am an alp. Still, I grip your embers hoping if I burn off my finger prints I can be somebody new, somebody who is not killing themselves trying to love you. I want to be strong because weak hurts, and I want to kiss you and feel fireworks but all we get is steam. You are not my element and we are not star-crossed just incompatible. I am addicted to the burns you have inflicted on me: I feel them fade in your absence and I miss their sting. I like being reminded that you hurt me, I like being reminded that you touched me once. That you looked at my jagged edges and dared to grab on knowing like glass I could shatter but trusting that I wouldn't: you liked me to believe I was strong. I thought we were perfect for each other and I get stuck in our memories. I can only remember your perfections, and the little things about you until I can only smile because nobody knows fire like I do. I let you take everything I had but I can not control you. You rage through everything; brashly burning paths that aren't familiar to me and you don't want me anymore, you make me wonder if you ever did because you seem to like having me watch. Watch you love other people properly. Watch you finally blaze in the life you've always wanted. I am only trying to rebuild my snowy disposition but you keep lighting me on fire. I don't like fire I can not control.

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

I should apologize for the days I am withdrawn. This is not what you signed up for. I should apologize for when I don't want to speak or communicate with touch or when I want to be without you but also do not. My indecisiveness is appalling: and I should apologize for that. But today I do not want words. I do not want to be felt because I feel you grabbing and pulling instead of caressing and comforting. You have not done anything wrong. I am just mean. I am just inside myself today and when you want to know what is up I want you to accept that I say the sky instead of pressing for more. My thoughts are poison right now. You shake me like a magic eight ball and I keep thinking try again later but saying not likely. I have the capacity to be kind but my words are pinpricks in your chest and every time I claw you with my numbness I inwardly cringe because I don't mean it, I am sorry, and I should apologize. But I can't. I can not bring myself to vocalize that I am not okay because you'll want to help and I don't want to be okay. Not yet. I want to hide in my closet and cry without company. I want time to myself today. But I don't want to hurt you. I am sorry. You are no burden. I am withdrawing. Not from you, but from me. I don't want to be kind, or resilient, or strong today. I just want to fold into myself, I want to be small and insignificant. I am tired of being fun and happy, it's tiring work. I need time to be low without an interrogation. I just want to be empty for a moment. And I should apologize.