you reek of hope and 3am adventures.
you look like the kind of guy who
could save me; save me from the mess
that’s scribbled all over my skin. I have messes
people don’t dare to clean up but you look like
the kind of guy who could wipe me clean
without even flinching.
as if the monsters hiding in the closet
of my memories took one look at
you and headed for the wind.  

you look like a miracle on two feet.

I’ve always hated the damsel in distress,
but if you keep looking like that- like everything I’ve
ever hoped for-
I might have to become one.

please place me on the bookshelf.
you can pick me up,
read the fine print,
crease my corners,
cross out the transgression,
and annotate the virtue.
but Please put me back on the
bookshelf.

If I’m left on trains or
on benches by the bus stop-
If I’m put in places I don’t belong-
I’ll fade.
my print will pale,
my creased corners won’t recover,
my transgressions and virtues
will interrogate themselves.

I’ll become the environment
my fickle pages are left in.

so please put me back and
never touch me again.


-*if we allow ourselves to be placed in bad environments,
eventually, we will become them.

It’s 3:00am; I’m sitting here in the dark trying to come up with something sweeter to imprint than all the dirt my pen aches to trail behind. I want to be sunny with my words because I feel sunny. I feel the steadiness of life mending every broken bone in my body. But I’m afraid the sunny road is not the honest one. I’ve begun to learn on this journey of written words that I do not choose what goes on paper and what does not; my mind feels before I do, it writes before I do. My mind is guiding me to write the pain I’ve already felt, to use it. —you didn't feel those feelings for nothing, so you could let them die in vain; take them, make them tears that perish in jars of untouched honey—. But I can’t offer honey without offering the mess and stickiness it beacons.
So as I plunge myself into a mess only made pure with ink, I realize that I am not responsible for the honey dripping on my paper,
but I am responsible for the taste it leaves when it reaches your tongue.

you filled my stomach with
gardens full of roses
but my, oh my has it
caused a tummy ache.
you must have forgotten to
check for thorns.

they never said it out loud but they
wanted me to grieve quietly,
behind closed
doors, grab the key and lock it!
they could see my demons clinging
to my flesh and peeking through the
darkest parts of my sorrow-ridden eyes;
it terrified them.
so they begged me to              
grieve quietly because they
knew that somewhere inside them
was the hidden truth that
pain, in fact, exists and as hard as we try,
as much as we beg, it cannot and will
not be avoided.

you hurt me, you wouldn't stop
hurting me. you pushed my head under
the waves and counted down my
very last seconds before
you let me taste the air.

you unscrewed my training
wheels while I wasn't looking and
watched me fall to the ground
every single time. you saw the wounds and
bruises; you looked at them with pride,
as if each one was a trophy you displayed
in your trophy case heart.

years have gone by; all my wounds and
bruises have healed and you are nothing
but a forgotten cobweb in the corner
of my memories. you are nothing but
irony behind steel bars.

I wonder if you still go to that
trophy case and look at all the healed
scrapes and bruises that were once
fresh wounds.
I bet it kills you to see them
so untouched by you.

It’s the feeling of being borne back,
hidden beneath solace but thirsting to
be risen among the ashes of a shy tide.
It’s that same feeling that hushes me to
rest yet convulses me to wake. So I
wait here for the peak of that same
feeling to come simmering along at its
fullest potential, to drive me back into myself,
to find something, grasp it, and decide
whether to **** or breathe it to life.
This is what finding yourself is; a war waiting
to be won, blood needing to be shed,
sacrifices calling during the sweetest of dreams.
so we fight, ourselves caught in the riptide,
to find and to be found.

I thought I could grasp you
and end up feeling nothing.
I thought I could touch all the
moments that felt like sand and
mold them into something easy; easy to
bury and never dig up again.  

I rushed to your shores, eager to get it
over with; feel what I needed to
feel and walk back to my life
without a sting.
but my god, the waves came
and they wouldn't stop.
they pushed me so far into you,
I didn't know whether to cry for help
or let them soak me up
until they’d had enough of my saltwater
heart.

I was 300 ft. deep.
and I’m sure you could
find scraps of me littered far  
inside in your oceans.

I thought I could grasp you and feel nothing.
Instead, you sunk me and made
sure I felt everything.

thank you.

March 31, 2016- Journal entry          
                          
I’ve always felt guided to things, drawn to every destination mapped out for me thus far. But for some reason, at a time where I need guidance the most, I am stuck. At a time where I’m told to move the most, my feet remain frozen to this place. I keep telling myself “you need to move, you need to move, you have to move!”. Maybe I feel safer on pause. Maybe I am scared of paving the wrong path for myself. I’m about to graduate and college doesn't feel like much of a destination… it feels more like four walls that weigh any sort of chance I have at making it in this world; it feels like a calculation. And if all my numbers don't add up right, just perfectly, I’ll fall and end up stranded in fractions of lost potential.

But right now, in this exact moment in time, my pen feels like enough; my pen feels like a perfect destination, and with every period I mark, I feel closer to it. Maybe I’m completely naive and clueless.  Who am I to solely rely on my pen to take me places, important places? How stupid can I be? To believe in my work… to believe in myself enough to pave streets of ink and scribbled out words?
My work, this ink, it is all I have to offer, it is all that consumes me and I don’t think classrooms and crumpled up graph paper will change that. So maybe I'm paused because I’ve already crossed the line of my destination. I can’t help but think this is where I'm supposed to be. This ink, as long as it runs,

                                                               ­                    I don’t have to.