Nobody is ever happy with what they got.

My body clings and hangs on me like damp clothes,
It's my favorite outfit.

My body is random brush strokes and smears of paint,
People have seen it as art.

My body acts as plain, simple soil,
On it, I have grown like a tree.

My body is an opinion.
Interpret it as you will.

I'm still learning

Everyone has a talent.
Whether it be practical or not,
Pleasing or not.
Everyone has a talent.
And sometimes that talent is just
Not good.
A talent for being impeccably rude,
A talent for ******* up relationships,
A talent for making people hate you,
A talent for spitting out gibberish when someone asks, "Why are you sad?"
Everyone has a talent.
But when people look inside themselves,
And see the talents they never wanted,
They fake another.
They learn to carry a note,
Play an instrument,
Draw a picture,
Write a poem.
But inside they know,
We're not good.

3rd Grade, Awards Assembly
Children are filed into the cafeteria in almost orderly lines
Giggling about silly jokes that make no sense to adults
But for awards, they are silent, and expecting.
Kindergarten, first grade, second grade, finally
The little girl with her shiny black shoes waits for her award telling her that she qualifies as smart
And she receives perfect attendance

8th Grade, School Computer Room
Awkward preteens set in blue plastic chairs
Friends clumped together around a single screen
"Secretly" googling ***** like it's a crime, though everyone knows
But in the very back
The girl with her black bag full of books checking her grades online
Has her nose to the monitor and worry in her heart
Because just perfect attendance makes her a disappointment.

Junior Year, Home Bathroom
Soapy water soaks the floor and into a dollar store rug
The bath is half empty and tinted a rusty shade of red
And sitting on the floor with her knees to her chin, carving A+ into the scarred skin of her arm
Is the girl, almost a woman, with her eyes messily ringed in black, who doesn't dare cut too deep.
Killing herself would mean losing her perfect attendance.

Walls and chains, walls and chains,
That is the metaphor for containment.
But do not forget that of your own mind
It'll lock you up and tell you lies,
Replaces emotion with logic
But the logic is just so chaotic
And you can't break free of this
In your mind, walls and chains are what you miss.
The mind is what convinces you to regret
Kisses and touches and feelings and yet
You know in your heart the feeling is true
Its like there's a war between the two
Walls and chains, walls and chains
They know nothing of containment.

Plastic People, with their rubber dreams and artificial passions.
They're raised by their plastic parents who give them wax smiles, hollow promises for a future.
Plastic people and their perfectly polished personalities have superficial beliefs, in which they are the center.
Their corrupt ideals on intelligence place people in categories of A through F, score others out of 100.
Plastic people know nothing beyond the realm of themselves. Their selfless actions preceded by selfish thoughts.
Skills wasted singing self-centered songs, writing conceited poetry.
A plastic person does not know that they are plastic, but will accuse others of being so.
Now, what does that make me?

When you said "I could drown in your eyes."
Were you implying that they appeared the color of the ocean?
Because you have brought a storm to my ocean eyes.

I didn't know that when you said you loved my mouth
That you'd grow tired of kissing it,
That you wouldn't care when it had something to say.

And the day you said my body was beautiful,
Who would have guessed that you no longer wanted to touch it,
That your skin didn't long for mine anymore.

The worst part about it all is when I look in the mirror,
When I see my own reflection,
Because you too, had ocean eyes

The art of the written word is everything.
Each letter is a tune,
A dance of the pen on paper,
The ink, the mark of a masterpiece.
Your brain connects to the pen
And they become one thing.
Thoughts are words not yet written,
Written words are those not yet spoken,
And whomever can harness both,
Is an artist

The validation for a mental disorder is proof of your prescription
Because in this world your cry for help is considered a cry for attention,
And you are to be dismissed.

Being sad isn't permitted because somebody else in the world has it worse
Somebody trumps you on the ****-o-meter, so who are you to complain.
Put yourself in their shoes, you say.

No. I will live my life in my own clothing, my own skin.
I will suffer my own woes and ******, I will not be made ashamed of that.
I am important.

My own story is no less valuable, I will not make my mind believe otherwise.
I can and will do great things, no matter how small they may be.
And I will have lows along the way.

I may be weak for this, and that is just fine with me.
Between being weak and honest with myself, understanding my feelings and thoughts,
Is more important to me than pleasing you.

And as the sky paled to ashen grey,
I reverted back to the days of simplistic poetry about the weather.
How golden leaves contrasted sharply against the whiteness of above.
Content to ignore my inner conflicts,
I could entertain myself with the sight of my breath,
The squish of moist earth beneath my boots.
It was easier to look in the mirror and be pleased with what I saw
When the light was refracting through these dense clouds.
And none would be the wiser when they saw me happily trotting along.
None would have seen a falter in my grin,
Nor a lack of luster to the light in my eyes.
Perhaps that's the point to these little bits of written art.
If we can see a beauty in a drop of rain,
Then why not ourselves.

I found that I cannot cry, and expect, in my tears, that a poem has been written.
Emotion, and heart, and feeling are not the only components to art,
and boy is it ******* hard to come up with the rest.
Sometimes, I’m so choked up on inspiration,
that I can’t get my figures to move well enough to type or write.
I’ll have a feeling in my head, so strong that it washes away any words for explanation.

Right now, I’m stuck, so I stumble, and I fall.
The poem collapses onto itself,
And I’m back at the beginning again.
With so much feeling and ideas.
And Nothing to show for it.

I remember our first kiss.
I remember the way my lips moved, the way you made me feel as if I was more than I am,
And I remember the way you surrounded me, embracing me.
I knew you loved me since that day and I loved you back.
Your touches were caresses, you felt like home,
Like I belonged somewhere
And I wasn't alone anymore.
I finally mattered.
I could talk to someone who wanted to listen,
That meant the world to me.
I know I must be annoying my friends with how much I talk about you,
How much I praise you,
But I can't help it.
I've never felt so comfortable or safe with anything in my life.
You are an art, and I love you.
I love to write.

I am not the best at keeping in touch
I don't call or text my parents often
or my friends.
But for almost two years
I seemed to have lost touch with myself
Anger and Sadness and
void.
I was so void of me
for almost two whole years.
How does a person live without themselves for two years?
Some do it all their lives
I don't want to be like that.
I want to take the steps to feel like me
Just putting in the effort to care is the first one.
So hello myself,
it's been a while.

Each end,
And every beginning,
Are tied together in a loop,
Like the strings of infinity.
Our hearts beat together
In the web of existence
So long we last
Even in the eyes of pestilence.
The mortality of humans
Adds to the immorality of life
Every emotion lives on
Every tear, every strife.
Life is more than the pumping of blood
The alive do not all live
And how gone are the dead
When their stories are still said?

Love can be described as desire,
the flutters in your chest as your hands touch
the light in their eyes.
But love is more.
Love is fights you have to talk through.
Love is struggles with money.
Love is disagreeing on the color of your couches.
Love is wondering if you're still in love.
Its not easy. Its not always pretty.
Its having problems and solving them.
Years and years, endless changes
You can't expect every moment to be perfect
you have to work towards perfect.
Find the moments that remind you
why you had those flutters in the first place

Pain is easy.
Pain is merely the existence of something that causes you extreme discomfort.
Pain is an addition to my plate.
A plate filled with emotion, thought, memories, etc.
But see, it’s the good things to be wary of.
Feelings of love, confidence, excitement.
The thing about those feelings,
Is that they fill your plate so full, that the bad things like pain and sadness fall off.
Which is great in that moment, except,
It’s so easy to lose those feelings.
So easy to have them taken away.
Those good things are desserts that people want to steal from you
But nobody wants to take your pain, the rotten thing.
So when your good thing is taken away,
You have nothing left.
The funny thing about an empty plate,
It makes you hungry for anything.
Even pain.

Children are not so oblivious as an adult
Their wide eyes seem to see so much more than we
Their tiny ears pick up feeling and
We think them ignorant.

I babysat my two nieces,
One was 5, the other 7
And as I walked through the door one day
They greeted me,
“Aspen, why are you sad?”

Nobody else seemed to see
The buildings in my head crashing
But these little girls knew instantly.
Even when I smiled and assured them I was fine
They snuck little worried glances at me

At the end of the day,
When I had forgotten the beginning,
They hugged me
They said they loved me and that’d I’d be okay
Because they knew I needed it.

Children are not so oblivious as an adult.

Where is your passion?
It is so easy to hold an opinion
Given to you.
You take what you are given
And say that it is your favorite.

Where is your passion?
I see all these others
hidden in you,
under the folds of your sleeves
we ask you a question and they speak.

Where is your passion?
When people ask you what you want to be
do you say,
"Whatever makes money,"
And do you think everyone else knows
what you need?

Where is your passion.
Really, what do you love and why?
Do you have to think before you speak
Do you just lie because
You can't think of anything?

Your passion is in you.
You're a flame burning,
Some where in you is the fuel.
What keeps you burning is different
From the soot of the world.

Staying in love is a choice.
Falling in love is easy
You are or you are not,
And you can tell by feeling.
Staying in love requires the effort
Of keeping that feeling when the newness is gone
It requires a complacency towards your partner
While remaining yourself
Even as you change.
Staying in love is hard.
Most stop trying when the feeling begins to fade
Some wait for the feeling to come back
But those who remain in love,
Persist the feeling.

Why is knowing my problems
Never enough to fix them?

How dare you
How dare you sit there cradling your head
Wishing you had never been born
When you have birthed someone yourself
How dare you consider leaving him
His father doesn’t know how to take care of a baby by himself
How dare you think of the check the military would give him if you were gone
How dare you think that that would be enough.
The tension in your shoulders increases the pressure in your head. You fix it. You did it.
Your hands are what’s causing so much pain
Your nails are in your legs
You’ve been doing everything on your own for so long.
Is that why now you need to be told your next step
You need to be told where to go to be better
You wish you were better
No you say, you want to be good at something not better just good at
Something
Anything
You’re sick of articles saying that everyone is good at something because you need to be worth something.
You need to make money
Help your family
Help yourself.
You want to be remembered as more than a mom
More than a wife
**** more than some girl who took her own life
So you want to be good at something
You want to be worth something
You want back the passion you had
You want to strive for talent and skills
Being kind isn’t enough because being kind doesn’t help replace the dryer.
Being someone to talk to doesn’t pay for a deposit on a house
Well then ******* try something new
You say you’re not good at anything new no ****
You have no talents because you don’t work for them
You have no passion because you give up on everything.
You gave up guitar viola art writing crochet knitting school working out everything. You gave up on yourself.
So how dare you
How dare you hold your head and pretend you’re not good enough
When you’ve never given yourself the chance to be great.

She smiled with blue lips
Mascara on sloped eyelashes
She hoped the world didn’t see she was sick
Her hands shook and her hair was thin
She clipped in her extensions
She propped her camera on a tripod
She smiled with blue lips