I'm drying my face with a hand towel
The smell of you fills my nostrils
And I'm back in the basement again.
Not 21 drunk in her boyfriend's bathroom
But 7, alone in a musty basement.
7, alone in your room.
The smell takes me over
and I have to pretend I can function again.
Pretend the look on my face is only from exhaustion.
That wouldn't be a lie.
Your image in my mind makes me grow tired
and sleep isn't enough to cure this kind of immensity.
Inhaling through my nose
And exhaling from my mouth
I continue to breath you in.
Washing the impurities from my face
while I let you infect my body,
my mind and my entire being.
I must keep it together
Cannot break, you don't deserve this type of power.
My face is dry, so is my pride
I'm tired of wringing the despair out of my bones
and letting it soak-
only to grow roots beneath my feet
and vines on the backbone I have molded for myself
Out of tragedy and abuse and sheet metal
too hard to sink your empathy through.
But enough to let you sink your teeth into.
Break me from memory
rebuild me from the times
you have tried to smother my willpower.
You cannot do this to me anymore

I remove the towel from my face
Look at the person standing before me
Built from nothing but her own struggle.
Rising from the ashes like all the times before.
You are the only form of soldier
a uniform like your smile can wear today.
Give yourself a Purple Heart
you've fought this battle and deserve some honor.
Bruised you may be,
purple has always been your color.
Tragedy has always looked so **** good on you.

My dad tells me he is proud of me
somehow it makes the knife
he stuck into my back as a child
dig in deep enough to hit a vain-
I cannot feel my backbone anymore.

The animosity I felt towards my father
was always my fuel to this housefire he lit himself
burning all of our confidence down with it.
The resentment was always the extra leg I needed
in order to stand up to other men who shoved me down-
The strong arm I needed so I could push myself
further and further just to prove him wrong
looks like I did.

The house has been rebuilt
with no intention of being burned down
but somehow I'm still waiting for the match to strike,
for the flick of the lighter or the pouring of gasoline.
I'm waiting for everything to go up in flames-

When I get comfortable or consistent
I start to smell the fumes
and before I even have a chance to run away
I am consumed.
It's been too long since I've felt the warmth
starting to like the cold a little too much now.
The worry is worse than the outcome
and the possibility is worse than the actuality.

My dad told me he was proud of me
words I've been waiting to hear since I was four.
Makes me wonder if people actually do change-
makes me wonder if you can too.
Waiting around for the smoke to clear
is something I was never good at
couldn't take the lack of breath.

Loving you is void of the fire
but still breathing in the fumes
I hope it will end soon
but I like the way it tastes.
When it's done and the smoke clears
I can still smell it on my clothes.
A small reminder that I was once
so buried beneath a sheet of insecurity
it kept me from thinking clearly
seeing clearly
and everything just ended up ash.

All we have ever been is ash
a gust of wind away from oblivion.
Burn me down to build me up again.

I've been wreaking havoc on my head again.
Blatantly succumbing to the innocence surrounding my subconscious.
Everything sounds the same again and I'm having trouble functioning.
Everything is fleeting again.
Sand through fingers
but this fire inside my heart burns for you
so this sand just turns to shards.
Just like that sand I have been changing shape
and then hurting everyone around me.
These marks on my legs remind me-
I need oil in my car because if i don't change it soon
it will break down.
Just like me.
These scars are like race tracks upon my past
and I can't keep from going in circles.
But somehow these cuts are straight.
Like I could write poetry between them.
I need the sun to turn myself to glass
because it is stronger than sand
and it will make these scars turn golden.
I want to be golden again.
Give me sun
Give me warmth
and make me remember what it feels like to go the speed limit
I'm always in fast forward
but somehow constantly looking in the rear view.
My oil needs changing
and it's no surprise to me that I may wreck soon
Too distracted with what's behind
Too adamant on pressing the gas
when I know I shouldn't.
Taking things too far
Pushing too many limits.
Most of them speed
A lot of them my own.
None of them the things I should.
Can I go back to sand?
I want to take shape to the things around me
I want to be good at transitions.
You can't break if you are smaller than a grain.
You can break if you're always being stepped on.

The insides of my eyelids are the only idea of love I now know.
Only darkness.
and if I squeeze hard enough maybe I'll see something.
If I shut them long enough maybe I won't feel anymore.
Sleep is the only love I know.
Conscious doesn't know my name.
But the bed sheets call it like they're back from church camp.
Religion is only known in the dark.
My saving grace is blackness.
The halo is the blue inside my eyes.
The high makes it disappear.
Sobriety and love are synonymous.
Both things don't feel so good after a while.
Both make you feel too much.
Give me high,
Love makes me only feel low.
Six feet under and I guess my lack of religion led me here.
Abandonment came afterwards.
After what?
Everything.
Consistently.
Always.
Left.
Give me darkness
It's all I've ever known anyway.

1) I still have not erased the imprints your hands left all over me. These days are numbered, just like the times you tried to ruin me. I've stopped counting on you to let me down again. I've stopped counting period.
2) I compare every single guy I meet to you, so far I'm doing my best at avoidance. So far none of them have made my stomach scream outside of my throat when they kiss me.
3) These pills are taken because I want to get better now, not because I don't. Milligrams don't always equate to death. I'm learning the language of recovery and self-discovery from a bottle and a progress book.
4) I can't see your face behind me when I'm naked inside the mirror, or under the sheets of ****** desire, I do not find you there anymore.
5) You do not control me- the reigns have loosened and your voice no longer lingers upon my tongue. I am no longer afraid of big crowds without alcohol. I am my own form of stability and sobriety.
6) This face does not need to be masked by propaganda in order to leave my bedroom, confidence has accumulated into my conscious now and there is no room for criticism.
7) You have left me for dead, just weeds upon an empty field- you made me feel as if my existence was a nuisance, like it was too minute to even recognize fully. But I will not let you be my deforestation, I have spent too much time growing these roots in a place where I will flourish- you will not be my wildfire, landslide or any form of natural disaster. You are a single raindrop at best.
8) *******.
9) *******.
10) You don't even deserve to know I'm better than what you did to me. But you need to know that when my father objectifies women, it cuts a knife deep into my spine that makes me slouch a little more and when other men do the same- it makes me stand up straight again. We are not a product of those who make us, we are just a result. But with repetition those results can change. All of us are theories, not to be proven. Always changing, collecting new data. Ready to be disproven. So test yourself, push your own boundaries and don't be afraid of change.

I got out of the box someone else put my innocence in- I found my way back to it time and time again but I realized it was only to get back what I had lost. Only to find that the box was empty, only to realize they never really had a hold on me. It was just a theory, you are just a theory.

Believe in me.
Take my hand
let me lead you through this life
that has lead you through the depths of hell.
We have felt our fathers wrath of opinion
and been scored by the sharp knife in the back of siblings.
These things shook us both-
took us by the throat and caused us to stop breathing,
Now we feel as if every breath we take could be wrong
every step is in the wrong direction
nothing ever goes our way.
Discouragement is a warm gun,
we sleep with it at night
and wake up from it in the morning.
One thing can shatter our confidence,
the curse of constant critic
has left us conscientious of our conscious.
So let me lead you.
Fighting a war is better if you have an army
and we both have enough strength
to walk through the fire-tongued
judgment day protocol.
I don't want to do it alone.

The way your arm curves into you, and your hands fall over me
shows me you know your worth.
You just need reminding on some days, so do I.
The briskness of your humor glides through your lips
like it has left you exhausted from lack of laughter.
Let me be your lack there of.
Let me be your all of the above.
We don't have to walk through the flames alone,
we don't have to walk through the flames at all.
My saving grace lies within your eyes
and I see it everyday, all the time.
Holding you close to my chest
you are my favorite defense.
The best weapon one can get
is a heart full of love-
and a sword found where you rest.

My lungs are turning inside out again-
and this poem will be void of the use of I
because it is not known to me who that is anymore.
This heart is beating outside of my chest
and my eyes can not focus on one fixed point.
It is troubling to me
words cannot express how my body is handling this.
Situational irony has always been a good friend of mind
and my emotions are diminishing further and further inside of myself.
Repression is to what my mind is prone to.
Ever since the child in me grew roots
someone pulled them out as if they were weeds
so this person staring back at me in the mirror
has always been a figure unfamiliar.
Always someone who longs to go backwards
so she can feel the familiarity of childhood.
Instead she wears a face not her own
and a body who she has trouble looking at most days.
This week the discovery was made
that in order to purge herself of all of this negativity
some weight had to be lost-
seems she doesn't know what that feels like
she doesn't recognize what that looks like-
but she makes a direct correlation between
memories and loneliness.
These nights have been mistaken for sleep
and the dreams mistaken for reality.
It's no question that identity has always been misgiven.

She makes no sense of her poems
and these words she writes down like they're her last.
The shaky hands make it hard to type
and she doesn't last more than a second in self-assessing,
she knows all too well the deep cut of judgment
but clings to the idea of contrastiveness.
Hoping that comparisons will not be her downfall
and that these words somehow make sense.

Again is something she insists on typing
because repetition and consistency is what she longs for-
but it never seems to come from anything but her own mind
and a body that is too in tune with the chaos in her bones
she shakes too much, and feels nothing all at once.
Calamity and clarity are not words she knows the meaning of-
only catastrophe
she puts it on her shelf and is proud of how she ended up with it
worked too ******* the life of others
and no hard enough on herself
but she still sees it a prize.
Even if she's not the winner-
even if she doesn't reap the benefits.