we lay in the fields and on the dry hills
and smoked green out of a purple pipe and you kissed a boy who talked about crystals and rolled down under the stars
i shared my cigarette with soft lips and a strong jawline,
we all drew ourselves together on the hill that overlooked the world;
we we're the tallest, vastest beings ever to live, and the glowing lights that we're stuck like splinters in the palms of the sky we're mere reflections of what was within our glowing skin.

grey clouds bursting stark,
volcano
ash exploding
crawling
drowning
amber measures of coal black
lungs
back aching,
carrying newborn mornings.

sometimes its easier for somebody to see what's wrong
when they can't hear you sob like
a hyperventilating storm
--------
i know you want to tear out your organs with your nails,
but please hold onto your insides for me,
because you are enough.
you are whole without needing love from people
who don't matter.
and you can't forget it, because you don't need approval from anybody but yourself.
and i want you to know
i'll never forget that time when we we're drunk and stumbling
and i saw that you had white scars slashed on your legs too,
and knew that I wasn't alone
because we knew one another's pain and we loved eachother for it anyway.
you are kind,
remember it. you are strong like a steel whip in the cold icy
morning of a december winter, but you are soft and kind and you are warm
like strawberry vanilla popsicles dripping and summer heat sweltering,
and please
never forget to be kind
to yourself
especially.

--------
please try to stop ******* everything up.
you make things ******* yourself, and maybe if you just learned to let go
and accept that your problems are no more important than every other single living being on this earth, maybe you'd smile a little more. your smile is beautiful, and i don't think you know that. life treats you so well, you just have to open your eyes and
WAKE UP.
you have to escape your little world sometimes,
and admit that we're all breathing in the same atmosphere into our lungs.
you can get better so easily,
you just have to let yourself.
because i know,
you aren't letting yourself heal.
let that small peach tree grow it's roots.

--------
giving yourself away to boys who only care about your body, won't make them care about your feelings. drinking until you fall asleep wont make the world disappear, it'll just make your memories sink to the bottom; you need to filter them out.
don't be afraid anymore, be real. be who you are under those layers of flesh and bones,
be the soul that screams and hammers to be let out. you are so real.
and worthwhile.
so many people care about you,
you are something magnificent and
it's not your fault. to be free, you need to stop blaming things on yourself.
let it go from your clenched palms, because things are getting better just as long as you make them that way.
i feel like you forget how strong you are, how you have so much power in those long, pale fingers. how you can create and destroy with the mere movements of your tongue.
i don't want you to forget that what you hide inside you is something gleaming and vast, and you should pull away the blinds
and let the sun shine through.

--------
i feel horrible because i was the girl who taught you that feeling was a horrible thing to do.

that because you let yourself
get too emotional over the fact that
i was too unattached to love you in the way you wanted me to,
and every time we tried, i would runaway from your waiting lips
and laugh like venom dripping behind closed doors to hide
from your confrontation about why i never wanted to let people love me
and return it.
now, you walk with a metal shield up
i remember you said a long time ago
“now i know every girl will be like you,
and i don't want to try ever again.”
i wish you would still tear up to really good music,
and let your barriers down.
because it's not true, there are women
who will treat you right,
and love your bad jokes,
and not lead you treacherously into their traps of poison and bones.
be true to the boy you harbor so reluctantly in your tough exterior
because i can still see him in your eyes when you smile,
and he's beautiful.

--------
you think that the words you write have nothing to do with what you hold inside.
you're wrong about that.
you are the things you imagine yourself to be, but you have to release them from the fear tight in your chest.
you aren't damaged, but people will see yourself that way if you hold your body like that. straighten your spine, darling, and pierce their eyes with the knowledge that you are
beautiful like vines crawling up gracefully over a window
you are smart like the cinnamon colored pages of old books,
you are mysterious like the deepest parts of the ocean,
and alluring like the soft, midnight tide.
nobody forgets about you, you aren't small in anybody's mind.
nobody thinks that your ordinary, they think you're fantastic,
and you need to break all your mirrors
and with scarlet dripping from your knuckles like rivers
on ice
you need to admit that you don't need them.
it makes me so happy to see you slowly blossoming
into the wild rose i know you are.
take care of yourself,
because that is the only way anybody else will be able to care for
you.
your soul is huge like the
morning sky
let yourself feel it.

--------
find your voice, and speak clearly to people who are shaking your boundaries, and tell them to BACK OFF.
yell it if you have to,
stop letting them invade you and squeeze your insides like they even have
any right to.
scream into their faces that you are not weak,
and let loose your mean side a little bit.
never let yourself be taken advantage of.
look into peoples eyes,
and search desperately for their truths.
if they don't hold their vulnerability raw and beating in their palms,
then they're not worth it.
never expend your energy to make somebody else feel better.
you can share with them your happiness, but never give it away;
because you are not an empty girl.
you are a fulfilled girl bursting at the seams with things it means
to be completely alive
and laughing
and feeling.
don't hide that.
people think its nice to be hurt
and it's so mature and creative and artsy to be damaged.
they think its romantic when you can be
“saved”
by a stupid prince who wont give you **** but a plastic crown and sore hips.
DO NOT GIVE INTO THAT *******.

your eyes crinkle when you smile,
and you have small teeth that are like
waxing moons.

nobody wants to be happy
because they think it wont last,
because they think its not beautiful
but you my dear are living proof.

The children are all crying in their pens
and the surf carries their cries away.
They are old men who have seen too much,
their mouths are full of ***** clothes,
the tongues poverty, tears like ****.
The surf pushes their cries back.
Listen.
They are bewitched.
They are writing down their life
on the wings of an elf
who then dissolves.
They are writing down their life
on a century fallen to ruin.
They are writing down their life
on the bomb of an alien God.
I am too.
We must get help.
The children are dying in their pens.
Their bodies are crumbling.
Their tongues are twisting backwards.
There is a certain ritual to it.
There is a dance they do in their pens.
Their mouths are immense.
They are swallowing monster hearts.
So is my mouth.

Listen.
We must all stop dying in the little ways,
in the craters of hate,
in the potholes of indifference--
a ****** in the temple.
The place I live in
is a maze
and I keep seeking
the exit or the home.
Yet if I could listen
to the bulldog courage of those children
and turn inward into the plague of my soul
with more eyes than the stars
I could melt the darkness--
as suddenly as that time
when an awful headache goes away
or someone puts out the fire--
and stop the darkness and its amputations
and find the real McCoy
in the private holiness
of my hands.

Not that it was beautiful,
but that, in the end, there was
a certain sense of order there;
something worth learning
in that narrow diary of my mind,
in the commonplaces of the asylum
where the cracked mirror
or my own selfish death
outstared me . . .
I tapped my own head;
it was glass, an inverted bowl.
It's small thing
to rage inside your own bowl.
At first it was private.
Then it was more than myself.

Some women marry houses.
It's another kind of skin; it has a heart,
a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.
The walls are permanent and pink.
See how she sits on her knees all day,
faithfully washing herself down.
Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah
into their fleshy mothers.
A woman is her mother.
That's the main thing.

You said the anger would come back
just as the love did.

I have a black look I do not
like. It is a mask I try on.
I migrate toward it and its frog
sits on my lips and defecates.
It is old. It is also a pauper.
I have tried to keep it on a diet.
I give it no unction.

There is a good look that I wear
like a blood clot. I have
sewn it over my left breast.
I have made a vocation of it.
Lust has taken plant in it
and I have placed you and your
child at its milk tip.

Oh the blackness is murderous
and the milk tip is brimming
and each machine is working
and I will kiss you when
I cut up one dozen new men
and you will die somewhat,
again and again.