Oh love
My sweet  smiling sun
Please do let go of my tender heart
I crave the sound of your sweet voice
Wrapping around the poison of your words

Please put down my heart
You know not the thrall you have me under
I will follow you mindlessly
Basking in your light
Before I realize I’ve been burnt

Do take mercy on me love
I’m a simple fool
I will swallow all that you give me
And choke on all this toxic waste

Oh love
I ask that you let me go
For but I know you are ignorant to the pull you have on me
All I can do is pray that I’ll be wise enough to forget you
That I will be strong enough to tell myself the truth

I agonize over the small things
These days I find myself shedding clothes like so many leaves
I am certain that every combination is as horrid as the last
My shorts are too tight
My bathing suit is too small
My hair is too long
Nothing fits

When I look in the mirror a different beast stares out

She’s a strange creature
Her eyes are frightened but she stands up straight
She looks uncomfortable
She seems to know that she doesn’t fit here
But she comes anyways

I have almost grown used to inhabiting this girl
I’ve learned some of the strange rituals that girls like this do
Learned how to set her hair
Learned what to wear
What to say
How to act

I’m unhappy

It’s probably unrelated
I tell myself I’ll do what I want when it doesn’t reflect on others
God forbid my father has a happy daughter
I let the girls hair grow out
I tell myself I might as well
I buy jeans that fit like gloves around her thighs
They fit her

But I don’t

There are a different girls clothes in her closet
She tries to put them on
To make sense of who they belonged to

She looks in the mirror and I stare back at her
Suddenly I’m smiling
There’s a strange giddiness creeping through my chest

I put the skirt away and tell myself one day

The girl puts on the jeans that fit
And she lets her hair down
She pretends to exist another day

I don’t hate you
I think I know that
when the heat climbs my throat and spills out my eyes
I know its not hate

I convinced myself I hated you
I told it to myself so many times
I actually believed it

my anger is an emotion that fits you
anger for things you can’t control
things that you’ve taught me
so I hated myself too

you don’t understand me
or perhaps you understand me too well
maybe I hate you in order
to avoid looking too closely at my own reflection
I know I’ll see you there
but worse than that
I’ll see myself.

you are blameless
you are the victim
I am not the victor
you are what you needed to be to survive
and still you are soft and loving
in almost all ways that matter

I don’t matter

my feelings don’t matter

my mind doesn’t matter

I don’t matter

this is why I hate you
your heart has been killed
your spirit  has been crushed
your very being has been battered and broken
and you are good
you are still good

I am not.

I don’t hate you
I love you on the verge of bursting
you are a precious thing
I know I could never hate you
you have never done anything worthy of ire

I am ugly
I know that I am
we are alone together
it is only us against them
and I still never choose your side
I act like you are the embarrassment
I act like you are something that needs to be apologized for
to be excused

it is only us
against them
and I will never choose you

I am the embarrassment
so desperate to be accepted

I feel responsible for this
Every day your moral scale shifts further away
Surrounded by like minds there is no need to hide
You shed away the constricting skin I of a person I can respect
And spread your poison covered wings

You are tentative at first
And I forgive the things I find unforgivable
You always clench your fist when you say something I will disapprove of
But I cannot police your mind
I don’t want to police your mind

Little by little
I can feel the ugly truth settle in my lungs
That deep down
In all the ways that matter
You will never respect me
You will never love me

And in my desperation I will let you drag yourself further away from me
I will try to make myself acceptable to you
I will let you say the things that make my skin crawl
Because then you will trust me
And some part of you will be mine

I don’t want to face my part in the monster I’ve created

I wish for death
Not in its nebulous abstraction
I long for the sweet  sensational crushing of my bones and heart
That the ceiling would break open and spear me
Release me from the burdensome decision
I crave the tender burn of rope
The tight  ecstasy of no air to breathe

I am a murderer
I **** the things that people love
But it is increasingly hard to believe that people could love me

I make ugly things
That is all these broken hands can  pull from an ugly soul
The world is stained with my ugliness
But in this world still
I am the only beautiful thing, the only soul with worth
There is no room for others

I wait for them to realize

I ache tonight
My body is boxed by these bare walls
I long for a smear of a feeling I don’t deserve
I long for pity
For the joining and understanding
I want to be remembered
I wish I didn’t exist

I want to be a story
For my grief to be held static in the pages of a book
I want my life to be a symbol
A metaphor with no consequence
The curtains are blue
I am sad

Simplicity

Soft skin in comfort
Its warmer here
Sweltering heat I can barely breathe
I drown with ever hitch of air
I drown in the sweltering space between your arms
This is a comfort I do not deserve.

Its unfamiliar, this place
different houses
and different lives that people live
the shadows loom so much larger

I could drown in the snow
be eaten whole by the cold
the wolves circle my dreams at night
the sudden realization
hauntingly different

and yet what scares me
is how little my whole life mattered
and foretelling
that I will never care for anything

No one hears me
and I've chosen this
I am an empty house
no ideas
no sounds

inside the empty house
the words echo
a cavern bellowing to be let out
to be heard

there is nothing to hear
there are no thoughts in my empty house
no heart to break
no closets to hide in

the windows are boarded
and the door is locked

but if you thought to knock
you would see
that in the empty house
there is me