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.

His mannerisms were peculiar,
His tendencies uncomfortable.
But he held himself as if
the world could never hurt him
And she found beauty in each of his flaws.
Slowly she rooted nearer him
Until she was a vine attached
at every point of his sturdy character.
She was a disease;
He was an evergreen, immune to her venom.

For the days that I speak less,
I do not love you less;
And the days I laugh more,
I may not be happier;
But the days that I tell stories,
Listen to every detail.

She missed him in between meals
and during sentences she read in her books.
She missed that smile of his when the radio played;
His laugh when she smelled the outdoors.
But when she laid her head against her bed pillow,
She no longer missed him
Because she knew he would be there tomorrow.

The words were sharp and stung,
but his caressing touch gave warmth to the ice beneath her shirt.
Like fingers on a chalkboard, he left her.
But his presence remained in the shadows the sun cast
and burned into her body.
His smell was forever around her waist,
his touch forever beneath her breath.

His neck, my hand, pure skin under pale fingers
Words flowing like colors of the sunset
Darker and deeper with every thought.
The blue in my eyes grew monotone as the tears
Drained their color. The emptiness aged
But the affection lived, intensity cultivated a colony.
Pale fingers weaved into the curls he put behind him,
Forgetting the tangled past that defined
The being I am. But his fingers brush my face
And realign my spine. The words ionize into letters
in the sound of his moan I feel in my chest.
And my vision blurs and the intensity goes sharp.
The pins rain from the sky in my head and I think, for once,
What if i stayed?

He spun over bridges made of sky and color
To catch a horse with wings, not to tame her,
But to follow and be with her because
She was beautiful and she didn’t know it.
Falling off clouds, she forgot who she was,
Feeling the pastel blue ache on her skin.
To the touch she was cold but it wasn’t enough
To put out the flames she set in her soul. Her anger
Stemmed from her stomach from the words
She swallowed when eating stones became too hard.
His pastel pink cured her chapped and chipped lips bitten by
The sounds she detested. More words were swallowed.
Her smile was soft and it was true.
But colors mix and her body became purple
And bruised from the memories that were left
From love and passion and loyalty. So she promised
To forget, to let the world collect dust. To stop the
Wind from blowing so we would all exist alone in
Our world. But the man with feet continued over
Her bridge because behind every tear was a smile she
Remembered but lost. And behind every poem and pain
Was a man and he wanted to be every word.

I held onto his words like vines on a brick building unable to stand alone,
unable to reach higher without dependence on something greater than me.
I was holding on with thin strands of yarn around my wrists and around my neck.
I fell so dependent on everything except myself to keep me going because I fell too weak to stand.
I gasped for air.
I hit the floor.
The world became too heavy and I fell into a dream.

I awoke from a dream, not refreshed, alone, lonely, and broken.
I awoke to find myself running, sprinting to find something- to find anything that would take away the pain, that would end everything right there.
But in that moment nothing was strong enough.
I thought everything was weak.

But I was the weak one, still.
The world wanted me alive and I tried to weaken its will.
I fell back into a drunken dream over and over.
And every night I wished myself away.
Away away away, back into that heavy dream.
That was where I belonged- in a heavy dream that you only awoke from weaker than when you fell into it.

He used to stare at me like a painting;
red paint flowing off the edges of a white canvas.
He used to speak in dimensions,
always philosophizing his world and the universe and the meaning.
He used to hug me in comfort because
some days were darker than others and I needed him then more than ever.
He used to worry about what I would do when I was left alone.
He used to worry about what would happen when I was not the only one in my house because
he was the only person that knew what happened behind closed doors.
He used to be optimism and the confidence I needed to survive.
He used to be the only reason I was going to come home.
He used to be mine but
he moved on.

For once: I am comfortable smiling;
I am comfortable being myself;
I am comfortable enough to say what's on my mind;
I am comfortable enough to support what i believe in;
I am comfortable loving who i am.

For once: I love the people who surround me;
I love the environment i am privileged in living;
I love who i am;
I love who i am when i am with people.

For once: I am better;
I am happy;
I can smile.

Its the physical rush you feel that makes you want more.
People never understand the metaphors.
Its the foreign blankness of your mind that you want to remember.
Because all you ever do is overthink and remember.
But maybe for one night you can lose the unhealthy part of you:
The part you hide from everyone true.
For one night, you do not need to fake who you are,
Because the rush will take charge.

Ring.
I know I shouldn’t but there is no other way. I have used up all my options; this is it. I am a failure; nobody likes me; nobody should like me; I’m a terrible influence. Why me?
Ring.
God it’s starting to hurt. Should I clean this up? No. I’ll leave it. It doesn’t make a difference to me. It won’t last much longer until all the pain goes away.
Ring.
What if it doesn’t work? I can’t see anymore. Just one more time.
Ring.
Why are my parents so ignorant that they can’t even hear me? Can’t they tell what I’m doing? ***** them; ***** the world; I wasn’t meant for this life.
Ring.
SOMEONE PICK UP THE **** PHONE PLEASE. I really can’t see now; my face is black and my body, red.
Ring.
…
Hello?
Hello?*
*Is someone there?

I stare into the glass on the wall
A stupid square glass
But I do not see the glass, I see myself.
I see a reflection of myself in the glass on the wall;
I see a grin stretching across my entire face;
I see constellations connecting ideas in my eyes.
But I do not feel like that girl staring back at me.

I feel like the dark side of the moon-
The side that no one sees,
The side people forget about.
I am the leftover thanksgiving turkey in the back of your fridge,
The turkey that goes bad after months of sitting there,
Alone.
But I try to force myself back into the world,
Move myself forward in the fridge of life.
Maybe they will remember me then.

I go out.
I make plans.
I cancel plans.
I make more plans.
I make more plans that I do not want to go to.
I make plans with people that I do not even like.
I feel bad about not liking people I should like.
I feel bad about not knowing people I want to like.
I am too afraid of knowing people I like.
I am afraid they will shun me from their cool lives because
I am simply not cool.
I am afraid people will see my backside, my dark side, my secrets.
I fear people will worry.
I fear people will worry about things I do not want them worrying about.
I fear people will not stop talking to me when I want to be alone.
Because all I want to do is be alone,
Because it hurts and I do not want them to see me hurt.
But I want help.
I want them to notice me.
I want some share of the sun that I deserve.
But maybe I don’t deserve it.
Maybe I am meant to be alone in this world just like I always have been.
But I keep screaming in my room
“PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME ALONE!”
And I complain to my friends about my loneliness,
But I deny their invites when I get the chance
Because I want to be alone.
Everything that goes through my mind is confusing and unexplainable.
And I just want it all to stop, to go far, far away.
But then it gets silent and in the silence I begin to worry.
And I realize that when the depression is gone, the anxiety comes back.
And I realize I need a home in between but I am stuck on shifting poles.
All I want to be able to do is to open my mouth and tell someone,
I need help from you.

Think before you swing.
One decision, oh how it can affect your entire life,
Your entire truth.
Your body, your mind, your soul.
Just think.
Calm yourself.
Instead of breaking apart your heart,
Break apart the wrecking ***** on your arms and open the palms inside them
And let go.
Flowers are most beautiful when they open up.
Stop trying to make yourself normal
Because you already are.
We all know pain, we all know happiness.
We have all felt before the main of the tiger.
Let go like an avalanche to be most powerful.
Don’t walk around with band aids in your pockets,
Keep smiles in your first aid kit,
Because most days those are more useful.
And as hard as it is,
Don’t stare into the mirror because the mirror is simply a sheet of glass
Covering the truth of what is on the wall and what is staring at the wall.
Instead become the mirror
Because your reflection is going to carry out everything you want done,
And you can and you will because you are reflecting yourself, the truth.
But remember depression and sadness will always creep up behind you again and again
So check your blind spot so you can get out of its way.
Spread your arms wide and wide
Ask the world why why why why why.
You will find the answer,
Behind the clouds, behind the fog, in the sunlight and in the darkness.
It is both everywhere and nowhere.
It wants to be found but it hides every time.
Truth is depression
And so are you.

Some people are blank canvases,
waiting for someone to create them,
waiting for someone to make them into something beautiful,
because they cannot find beauty in themselves.
They are the quiet ones;
the ones in the background allowing people to write all over them.
They get used and abused
and don't know how to say no.

Some people are graffiti walls.
They are the loud ones;
the ones under the spotlight waiting for people to see what they offer.
They can use and abuse,
and don't know when to stop.

But someone people are colored walls.
They show there true colors.
They can be bold red;
they can be haunted grey;
they can be lucky green;
they can be depressed blue;
sunshine yellow;
jolly orange;
mellow purple;
whimsical neon;
or pure white.
They are seen as 'lucky' because they seem to know exactly who they are.
But they are the unlucky ones.
They have no chances to become anything else.
They are who they are and have to live with that forever.

I am colored wall dreaming of becoming a blank canvas.

I didn't mind her bushy eye brows
I didn't mind her unbrushed hair
I didn't mind her mismatched shoes
I didn't mind that she never looked nice
Because she wasn't meant to look nice
She was made to make me feel something
She was art
Art wasn't supposed to be "nice"
Art is supposed to make you feel something
Something new and extraordinary
And I knew from the moment I laid eyes on her
She was meant for me

I am your smart mouth *****,
your ******* daughter,
that thing that lives in the back room of your house.
I am your ******* blood.
I am the earth dripping inside of you.
I obey your every command like a puppy.
I hear your every word and remember when you forget.
I give you everything you want because your happiness is important.
But secretly I dream of death.

Your presence is the poison I am dying on.
The scars on my arm are your hands- your making- not the cat's.
My flushed face is from too many beatings and slaps.
You ***** slapped your own *****.
And now I want to know why you did this.
Why did you want to hurt my emotional and physical being?
What did you expect to acquire from this?

What the hell do you want from me?
If you wanted death, you got it.
I dreamed of ways of killing you,
but you and I both know I will be the one to go.
I will be the one to **** myself in order to save your *** once again.
I am your angel who misses heaven,
but my **** owner has sent me to hell.

I hope your heart stops when your blood stops dripping.
I hope you feel empty when you have no one to control.
I hope you get everything back that you deserve.
Karma is your new ***** and it welcomes you well.

The air is thick with dreams.
I feel it as I take that first step through the barred gates.
Some people may call it a prison,
But it is no prison:
Well worn stone with marks of leaves;
Draping trees from the sky to my thighs;
Calmness lurking throughout the grass.
The earth is merely taking itself back.

closed eyes
white shadows
open mind
dark soul
what does it feel to be happy
what does it take to get there
i am tired of washed up feelings
drowning my mind
let me free
let me free
i scream and i scream
but no one hears me
so i open my eyes wide
narrow my mind and my vision
look at the dark shadow casted below my feet
and i walk out the room as if nothing happened
i am happy remember
i must keep telling myself that

In a box I lay
Shiny and
Reflecting the truth
Which may or may not
Want to be seen
By human eyes
That are full of lies.

My silver point
Underlines everything about you
That you wish to hide.
It turns your skin
Like a magic wand.
Ever so lightly
Giving you a frown.

You take me out
When you want to feel,
Then put away
When you want to be real.

I was made with innocence
And used by your mind.
My body inexistent
But I'll ruin yours
As easy as with a little line.

So beware of my power
I will let you know right now.
I am not what you need.
I am definitely not what you want.
I am here as protection
Just not against yourself.

Leaves come down
and brush against my forehead
as I walk underneath its rain.
It stands tall and mighty
like nothing can tear it down.
Somehow the belief
of infinity flourishes,
thought its roots,
up its spine,
and out through its tips.

I stare from its feet,
stuck into the ground,
without the ability to move.
How can such a being be happy.
How can it live.
How can it prosper.
I wish I would understand
but I cant.
I cant comprehend
how people and nature live
without moving
without seeing things.

I guess I expect too much
and am oblivious to everything else
I already have.
Why cant I just be happy.
Why do I have to care.
I want to be rooted and learn to live.

Polaroid cameras
Trees with leaves
Mason jars of water
Adventures into oblivion
CDs
Journals with no plain pages
Studios with paint on the walls
Brick buildings
Small towns full of life

Maybe I am not suited for the life everyone wants for me
Maybe I am not the person everyone believes I am
Maybe I am not the girl people fall in love
Maybe I want so much more than what I will ever be offered
Maybe I am just trying to get through without attention
Maybe I am scared of what is to come
That it might not be what I expected or dreamed of
Maybe I don't want to live period.

If I lay here
watching the sun set,
feeling the safety of the dark
in a field of thorny roses,
maybe it will take the pain away.

My skin,
it has no color,
as pale as Luna.
You caused my blood to drain,
through my wrists,
through my legs.

Tears fade,
memories stay,
regret is awakened,
forgiveness is mistaken.

You are the thorns.
You are my murderer.

my sentences don't have an end
my body is so cold
my hands hold each other
just to stay warm

I am not the girl you knew
I am not the girl you know
I am not the girl you will know

I am a rumor everyone thinks they know
But they all have it wrong
I seem innocent and sweet
But underneath I am a pile of tears
and blood and lost dreams

One moment
Blood rushes through me
Into my finger tips
New spirits flourish
All throughout my body
Sparks leave my red hair
Leaving it burning bright
Finally I see what I have spent my whole life waiting for
This one moment
Everything makes sense
Everything is alive
And I am a part of it

I am
I am alive
I am a part
I am infinite

I stare into her shadowy eyes looking for answers
But all I find are mistakes.
Her hands are like magic when they paint.
She turns silver into red so easily
And yet no one notices she has butterflies dancing on her arms.
She hides her darkest secrets under her sleeves.
No one questions her tears because no one has seen them.
She masks herself with a smile when she's dying inside.
She wants freedom. She wants happiness.
I walk away from the mirror, put my razor down
and smile as I walk out the door as if nothing had happened.