It's late and I remember
I tell myself it is not true
I wish I could forget
But I do not want to forget
The pain that was real and felt
And worthy of acknowledgement
Because they did not believe it
When they were told
The truths behind the cuts
On her forearms
And cracked bone in her finger.
She did not want to hit print twice
But he forced her to reveal her intelligence.
He had put too much money into her brain
That he deserved to see an outcome.
She was not a person,
free to live.
She was his daughter,
A product of his upbringing.
She was a fighter and a suicide bomber.
He flipped her thoughts upside down,
But it helped her see more clearly.
Love was a funny thing
When locked outside your house
For not saying thank you.
Gratitude was a funny thing
When reaching out for help
Ended in shattered bathroom tiles.
But he was her produced.
And she was his daughter, suicidal.

The light was not always obvious, I told him.
I appreciate the experiences, but I miss the sights.
The pressure in the tunnel I live in has grown too great,
I feel compressed.
And I thought he would hear the rhyme,
but he never understood; I was depressed.
I was shadowed by myself and by his expectations.
I was not perfect, but I was intelligent.
But I wanted to live in the trees and vouch for the Earth,
our Mother.
But he never told me about his mother.
I saw her often, but never knew who she was.
Never knew who he was before me, before my mother.
What made him smile on the school bus?
Was it the sun? Or was it the coming of the moon?
My mother didn't believe my choice in emotions.
I didn't choose to be this way.
The towel on the hook hasn't been used
Because the chemicals will burn my skin like they were burned away from the earth.
I am obsessed.
The addiction to loving her consumes me, sometimes.
The lady bugs that fall from the ceiling light onto my desk remind me how small I am,
but how noticeable I can be.
I can be heard, but not by all.
I am a cloud in a sky.

I always loved reading poetry more so than I did writing it.
Don't get me wrong,
I can be a hopeless Romantic weaving her way through
the transcendental woods in search of my truth.
But the way some folks can paint their typewriters
to cover up the stains of the pain they shed into
strumming these words and these words and these words
into soft waves on warm beaches.
My heart is welcoming,
it hears and it listens and she smiles.
But my pain is only watered down by tears,
suspending my bed load of muddy thoughts
into a wave of destruction.
My words are strong and tear the page.
I wait for the waves to die down, but they don't.
I wait, suspended in my own darkness.
I sit and I pace and I run,
but I can't run.
So I pass the time by thinking,
And when I think, I stop seeing the flowers
But I feel the blooms and the I feel the thorns.
I dissolve into my darkness, an ion in the ocean,
a suspended load, a weight.
I drown.
I swim, but I drown, and I float but I cannot see the sky.
I see, but I am blind of any light.
Why does the sun set earlier?
I stride slower, carrying myself along.
I remind myself to keep going, I can't stop now.
There's ice and I am reminded of myself.
Crystallized thoughts frozen together,
Too weak to stand on their own.
Ice needs other ice.
I need another I, but not me,
I have another me, myself, I live with her.
She follows me when my shadow is gone and the sun is down.
Am I the shadow?
Who is the girl?
She wants to know, but I want to know.
When my thoughts are thought, does she feel the hurt too?
When I can't see, does she?
Should I stop looking in the mirror now? People are staring.

It wasn't that she didn't feel like herself;
The problem was she felt too much like herself in a place where no one appreciated her.
She stumbled through mistake after mistake,
regretting her footsteps and apologizing to her shadow.

He caressed my neck and back
as I dug my nails into my forearm.
I pushed his hand off my waist,
******* in my stomach as I rolled over.
Stained rain falling sideways,
quietly,
but he could hear every change in breath and heartbeat
in between his snores and spasms.
He pulled into me, whispering "I love you, i love you"
into my ear.
But I kept pushing myself off the edge of the bed,
because I had finally found my person,
but I hated who I was.

She was brighter, happier in black & white.
Her pale skin glowed, reflecting the light from the sun she hadn't seen in months.
She kept to hiding under the bed, scared of the monsters tucked sweetly into her pillow cases.
Shooting stars shot across the sky while she was busy counting the sheep of the nightmares her mother did not know.
She took walks in the dark so maybe her fear would fade.
But there was no grey between the black sky and the white moon.
She felt in thicknesses, not in shades.
She was too deep in to change.
Her shadow rest in front of her awaiting a step she never took,
Until she turned back on all of bodies she had lost.

She wanted it all to be perfect,
each cut and bruise and crash and fall.
She wanted her rosy body
to mesh with her blue spirits
forming a lavender sheet to which
He would take advantage of.
**** to the mind dissolving in her skin
and the lining of her insides.
But it was the end, the bottom of the bottle.
She stumbled down and out,
diploma in hand.