here's to the ones who hold on.
who look back,
who still check their phone.

who stay signed into Netflix, letting their ex still log on.

here's to the ones who continue,
the people who don't thrive.

the break in breaking up.
the die in alive.

here's to the ones who stay,
who feel better,
who taste decay.

the ones who make excuses,
who speak of love,
who tie their nooses.

whether we stay or leave we're still holding on.
the go in going never turns into gone.
yesterday's actions brought back from the grave.
forced to be the savior when you need to be saved.

I am at a loss for words when she tells me that she’s not pretty. I try to tell her how wrong she is but I’ve already been labeled a liar and I can already hear the words passing through my lips and fading into the air like a plea of “not guilty”. I realize I’m not equipped for this. I’ve never known how to reassure people. I have such strong, misguided opinions on things, and all these high, impossible expectations for myself. Am I vain because I look in the mirror and search for a piece of myself to hold onto that feels real and right and pretty? I guess I judge other people, too. But I’ve never looked at her and wondered what parts were real. I’ve never wondered what she would look like if her nose was different, if her arms were different, if her lips were different, if her voice was different. It took me a while to realize that when I sit near her, I feel a person next to me. It was such a strange and new feeling. She turns her head towards me as she leaves a room and I understand why people start wars for women. But she’s already labeled me a liar and the moment has passed, and I can’t very well say all of this out loud. I don’t know what she thinks about me, but she rolls her eyes when I try to say what I feel and darts a doubting glare towards my confessions of insecurity all because I know how to hold a conversation with people on the street and I barely fill out a size 10. How funny, the one person who feels more to me like an actual person than anyone else doesn’t make me feel like one.

I look in the mirror and I am positive I see someone.
But I stare longer, and fuller, and I wonder -
How does this someone become real?
become real
to the man who saw me in the coffee shop,
when I turned my head
and the light fell from my hair
to my cheekbones.
to the driver who passed me
at the intersection
seeing the slight tilt of my chin
my eyes glancing quickly skyward.

I look in the mirror
and I see bruises under my eyes,
the marks of heavy tears, and
heavy scrunched up eyelids
that have left nights of despair on my face
as I've crawled to bed
clutching my knees to my heart.

I look at my hands and they have shadows,
valleys where dark green veins rise and fall
in tidy pulses.

I stare and I stare
and I wonder
when do I become real?
when the brains of brains of brains set eyes
on my sunken cheeks
my rushing veins
my scalloped knuckles?

I am embarrassed
to be real,
but I crave the pulsations
of brains of energy of connections
connecting
to flesh and eyes
and heart
and vein
and I sink into myself
and scratch the pen and paper
with red ink
and I am silent.
I pulse.
I pulse.
I pulse.
but who would know it?

Any moment is
the time to begin again.
It is up to you.

All I’ve ever wanted

was somebody who would understand.

Someone who would say

yes, you should **** yourself,

things really are that bad.

But you are not your circumstances

and you are not tied down by the choices
you are ashamed of.

And I know that tomorrow

you want to drive down the road,

with your windows open 

under the sun,

listening to your favorite song.

Because the sun does not discriminate

against those who want to feel it’s warmth,

it only asks

that you make it until morning.

tell me what to be
I've spent my life as a chameleon.
my head hurts from the smoke
of crashing and burning
too many times to count,
and I've turned into the flames this time.
you don't mean a thing to me
and yet I can feel my skin changing.
you don't mean a thing to me
but I'm tired of being grey
and searching
and camouflaging
and I can feel my skin crawling.

tell me to be brilliant
and I will swallow the stars.
tell me to be heartless
and I will sharpen the blade myself.
my head hurts, just tell it to be okay.
I am a chameleon
tell me to be myself.

Lately our shower has been doing this thing where it shakes when it’s running. But not as soon as it goes on, first there’s a light buzzing in the walls then BOOM not quite like a volcano, but a seizure in the veins of the house. I think it knows I’m about to collapse the same way, too. I feel the buzzing inside of me, somewhere deep down where the emptiness sits. The pressure just builds up, I’m turning from cold to hot in a matter of seconds, and I’m losing the control I had. Maybe our shower just needs to bleed out the **** clogging all the nooks and crannies that nobody can see, maybe it’s freezing over somewhere in it’s bones, maybe it’s just crying out in its own, solitary way. Everybody uses it, washing off the dirt they’ve accumulated through their nightmares and the dark nights, warming their bodies to prepare for the frigid pulse of life outside these four walls. Everybody uses it but nobody knows what’s wrong with it. It’s been like this for weeks. The repair man said it should be fine soon. The professional should know, we say. It’s becoming an inconvenience, you know. We don’t like the rattling, we don’t know when it will burst. Still, everybody uses it. We have a countdown, the shower and I. Who will go first, who will shake the longest until we collapse, how many people will use us until we’re used up.