I see them laughing, shimmering,
All around her.
She is the river,
the lithe, gurgling river
That everyone plunged into.
While I?
I am the cold icy drip from the eaves
That trickles down one's neck and makes them cringe.
I don't mind being unnoticed
Being forgotten
Being alone
I just mind that I mind so much.

Who are you
O robber of my softened heart?
Be still and know
You've got me paralyzed with love
From head to toe.
Once so solid, if I sought to swim
My heart would sink my chest like a heavy stone.
I'm waiting to wake in a cage.
I'm waiting to awake.
The way I hear you breath with my head against your chest.
Our lungs in perfect symmetry.
Set me on fire so I'll know if I'm dreaming.
I want to stop breathing.
If I died I'd know this unfamiliar feeling,
To be true or another temporary peace,
An eye of the storm my life remains until complete.
Bring my closer to complete.

I'm waiting to feel the fingers that hold my heart
Tighten their grip as the rip every makeshift stitch.
And I'll bleed out knowing it was always your hands, the cleanest hands, the most patient, truest hands, pure down to the sweat glands.

Just wake me up, this can't be real.
It's never been real, it's never real.
Cut me now so I can start to heal.
Sow me up with regret and pain
So I can experience your grace
When I'm too numb to feel the rain.

I've tried to talk to god but i think He stopped listening.
The same way I feel I tried to talk to my father but he already decided he was leaving.
So where do I go when my two fathers don't bother while I'm drowning in white water waiting for rescuing. Waiting for your hands to pick this boy up and say "son, I'm never leaving, never leaving again"
Father did you kiss me good night each night before you left to kiss your lover goodbye? Did you care if it was kind? Did you know the broken mess you'd leave behind?
My god is like my divorced father because I only talk to him on Sunday. After days of feeling ignored like a buey in the waves. My earliest memories of crawling into bed with you to keep warm and feel safe. Those memories are over two decades old and they still won't fade.
I remember my laughter every time I sat on your lap and you're tickle bug bit me till I thought my lungs would collapse, until I thought "this can last for ever" but that didn't happen.
You left a wife, a son, and a teenage daughter and left us all feeling like you'd never want us. Do you miss it at all?
Do you miss the snowball fights and cuddling your little boy to sleep at night?
My only memories of you and I are ones I tried to pull back because they make me wanna cry. Was the mistake your infidelity or was it me? Because you chose one and I believe it wasn't me. You were my king.
You left me to rule my life with this disease. A fear of abandonment and intimacy. And now how am I supposed to love? I can't see the forest through the trees, but maybe im blind so I can't see, anything. How could you do this to me?
Was my love, my smile, myself not enough? You had to take my heart too and break it along with all your old stuff.
I may never let go of my angry heart because even when I try to talk to God I wonder if His lover calls.
Will I ever be enough?
So when I say I can't love it's the fear you instilled in me. Like a needle shot into my arm to swim in my blood, I wish your love would swim in me. Definitely, intimately, swim with me. Infinitely.
Because I never learned to swim and I'm drowning saying Father save me. But night after night for twenty years slowly my childhood fears come to life.
Blood from our backs on the tip of your knife, dad why?
Why couldn't you turn around and lay back with your wife?

You're never coming home are you? No. You're never coming home.
You say you're just a stones throw
Well how do you know?
We don't know how far my tiny arms can throw,
What we know is I am prone to be alone
With mountains of sticks and stones
Laid on top of my broken bones.
And these words hurt me
"We are a broken home,"
And I'm just afraid to be alone.

We gave you our love
And you took it out of our home.
We gave you our hearts
And you away you drove.
I gave you my love.
You never got it in your head.
I gave you my heart
And you took it into her bed.

Dear dad, these demons, they're haunting me

'All swim' whistle,
water sent splashing,
the chaotic entrance of youth.

Adults scramble in the melee
while a man I do not know
bumps into me,
his hand down my shorts.
Confusion.

I ride home in shame.
Silent. Burning. Shame.

I am only 10
and tend to wince
at loud voices,
and right and wrong
depend upon the
time of day and
how many beers
my father drinks.

Country roads whip by,
sweet corn in the wind,
I watch the sun set
over the hill.

Once it's gone I know.

There will be no redemption,
 no reclaiming of innocence.

That shame feels like swallowing hot coals is all too familiar.

Mother says, “You don't look sick to me",

it's her answer for everything.

I never really felt as if
my mother had it all together.  
Her torch was
a brittle twig she couldn’t keep lit,
never enough stick to burn bright,
but just enough tip
for random flare-ups
violently fueled by
nobody knew what.

Her lack of light meant
she could not be trusted,
and her strained attempts at
love and affection felt like
a dream where
everyone’s speaking Japanese.

Her marriage to my father was
the modern day equivalent
of an interracial same *** marriage,
Catholics and Protestants
weren't supposed to mix,
and a toothless trumpet player
with an alcoholic bent
shouldn’t have lasted the honeymoon
with a spoiled, sheltered oldest child.

But father made it seem as if
they had it all together,
at least in public.
At home it was different,
he passed through our lives
like the winter wind,
everybody scrambling for cover
when he showed up.

He slept at odd hours
and worked and drank
and drank and worked,
blowing quickly from one
to the other, 
never standing still long enough
to notice the demons at his heals,
the demons that took forever to catch him,

but not mother.
They caught her when I was quite young.
I could see them in her eyes
from a very early age and
father could see them too,
but he did nothing
to protect her.

They’ve been together
over 60 years now, overrun by what
I would call a thick purple nothingness –
an eerie, detached existence within
the smothering cadence of monotony,
yet somehow, unbelievably,
they still have hope.

Hope for God knows what

all they have is their
unspoken hatred of each
wrapped up in a make believe
so strong and lived so long
that their demons are now
a huge white elephant
lounging about the house
loosening their bed screws,
pounding on the bed springs,
moving through the vents
and interfering with
the reception of Catholic radio.

You might call it insanity,

I say everything that
once mattered to them is lost,
yet again,
they still have hope.

Meanwhile
we overachieving children
suffer our own maladies,
a misfit bunch of
dysfunctional lovers running so fast
we’ll be 80 before the demons catch us.

But who am I kidding?
From father to mother to me,
their demons have been my closest friends
as long as I can remember,

ever since the first day
I saw them in her eyes.

shes slowly dying inside, and
no one can tell
She wants to
run.
from the daily affairs
that choke her
of her
sanity
Its always do this,
but dont do it now
not yet
and dont take too long with it
and make sure you do this
when you say that
because imagine what everyonell
think of you if you did say or do that
Its too much to process/handle
when do you have time to
sleep?
to eat?
to recreate?
theres no purpose to keep
going..to keep my strained pulse beating..
She wants to run to the
farthest point on the Earth
possibly off..
but why she feels this way nobody knows
"its just the turbulent teenage years"
they said
so she did run
and nobody
noticed...
She started to fade away every weekend
when she was under the **** moon
no one could hold her down
when she felt like flying
like
soaring..
until she had enough

and smoothly descended back to

her ground

I can’t write this poem
I can’t write this poem because the last time I opened up to someone artistically they told me it was pretty dark and I should keep it to myself.

I can’t write this poem
I can’t write this poem because I was raised in a culture that was anti love and pro meaningless ***. I saw endless commercials about movies that glamorize a lifestyle in which your body is fulfilled but your heart is ignored and at that impressionable age I learned my heart came second but my allure came first and the less I cared that happier I would be and I carried that belief around with me the way I used to carry around a Bible as a child.

I can’t write this poem
I can’t write this poem because of the time that I opened my father’s phone to reveal a family secret I would hold to this day against my own moral instincts unraveling miles of insecurities wondering if I’m not a good enough daughter or if he stopped loving my mother or if true love was never real and although I had been taught marriage was my purpose, it was what I believed would make me happy, maybe rings aren’t enough to stay in love and maybe people’s feelings change and maybe no one actually has a “one true love” and that this purpose I had been taught was really an endless wild goose chase that only lead to broken families and lost souls.

I can’t write this poem
I can’t write this poem because sometimes I still wonder why I fell into an abyss of toxicity at such a young age. And when I say wonder I don’t mean a trivial ponder, I mean I contemplate every possible reason why the person who I once believed held the universe in her eyes would lie to my face, why she never kissed me in public and our love was always a secret, why she valued girls with blue hair but my blonde hair was not good enough, why I had to hide bruises from my family when I was still in high school or more importantly, why at the time, I thought I deserved them. These thoughts, this lingering paranoia that I am undeserving of healthy love, they muddy my interpretations of real life and distort reality and effect my relationships. My doctor would call these intrusive thoughts, my best friend would tell me they’re symptoms of PTSD, but I have come to realize that I’ve been burned and I am damaged and I hope to god I can recover.

But you,
Oh god, you
You can write this poem. You can be my safety net while I’m free falling in love. You can be the one to listen to my mental tilt-a-whirls, you can be the one that introduces my body and my heart, you can be the one that calms the storms in my mind when I’m questioning the love I’m deserving of. You are the one who makes sure I fall asleep in my bed after drunk nights, you are the one that still sees my value after acknowledging my flaws.
You can write this poem.

if only youd notice me again. what i did was wrong but when i steal glances of you in the silence, old memories of the word 'us' would start to flood in. and i miss it..so so much. usually im happy with my emotional state but when i see you.. i start to regret all that led up to now. i wish things didnt have to play out the way they did. im so sorry they did. something had to happen it was either him or.. you. and i chose him. thinking about all the bad that we went through. letting it shadow over all of our good times together. i miss the way youd laugh and then once your laughter would start to die out like the flames that you once started in my heart, youd simply smile and look at me and id feel like you could really see through..as if for one more second you could really make me never see another again. so many- so many feelings and i dont have words to narrow it down. i guess you could just say im rambling now. i guess im not making any sense now..sorry..again.