one: the first day my skin met yours god realized jesus was his one and only regret.
two: if i could untangle all of the veins in my chest, if i could make them stop strangling every last molecule of love i have left in my body, you would see the last words you spoke to me fall out of their crippled noose like teardrops.
three: will she ever love you enough to give you her lungs?
four: when she screams "**** me" before she comes i hope you hear me screaming "*******" the night you walked away.
five: i write words and stare at the letters. the arrangement of letters is a puzzling thing to me, the way these same letters that can hold so much hate towards you once held the same amount of love.
six: they say time heals all. well why didn't they ever ******* tell me what happens when i have a broken watch?
seven: i made the stars fall out of the sky like they were the moons teardrops for you on the 31st night of lying in bed alone. you didn't see it because you were catching her tears in your bed instead.
eight: you will still walk the same streets that i do from time to time and i hope you see a footprint that looks like mine and realize it belongs on your throat.
nine: you are nothing but a tragic, rusty, chipped nail. you are the nails that pin me to this cross. your palms once fit into mine but now there's only holes from these stab wounds.
ten: i thought about the time you said you'd never leave and it knocked the air you inhaled into my lungs the last time you kissed me right out. it hit me so hard two ribs broke. it was a tuesday.

have you ever drowned in a pool of your own blood and been resuscitated by yourself after entering the 9 circles of hell? you enter one hell for each month, and at the end you are reborn again.

the first month, you are forced to watch a movie of your former lover's future love life, the day their sky wasn't your favorite shade of gray anymore, their wedding day, their children growing up in the arms of another, the ending of all endings. you cannot leave the theater, you cannot cry, you cannot scream, only apologize on a cycle like the mixtape you played on repeat that they gave you the day they first told you they loved you.

the second month, your demons circle you for 31 days straight. they tell you the stories of your past you swore you forgot, the knives you though you pulled out, put back in the drawer, and locked away are in their hands. they sing songs of everything that has gone wrong. they wrap their festering arms around your shoulders, they leave oil stained kisses on your neck on the same places all of your previous lovers did. they hold your hand like your mother did, they take you in their arms like your father did. they tell you they love you, you begin to believe them, and on the 31st day they leave, abandon you, the bitter iron taste that is all too familiar enters your mouth.

the third month, you are on the fourteenth floor of an abandoned mansion. salvador dali has painted a mural of what could have been before you drowned in that ****** sticky murky mess of red upon a wall, and you are forced to stare at this for two weeks. on the 15th day of this month van gogh appears in the corner with a box. you open the box and it is of course, his ear. he can see the monstrosity of fear upon your face, you see him open his mouth, you can see the pain escape his lips, but you cannot hear a thing, you look to the wall next to you and a the glow of the burning mural of what your life could have been lights up a wall of ears. you see yours in the center. you cannot hear the fear, you cannot hear the birds, you cannot hear the songs. your past and future are both now long gone.

the fourth month, you enter a white room. a projector projects every memory of your mother from the time you were in the womb to the time she saw your blood surface and your name headline the obituary. every projection of the memories of your father have a slit through the middle, and you swear to god for a split second you see yourself flash across the screen trapped in the barrel of a syringe with each of these memories. you are held captive in this room, this jail cell, with every broken memory that has led you to drown. you cannot cry. you cannot scream. you cannot even hear your own happiness, you cannot hear your mother's voice or the last time your father said i love you. the words goodbye pour as ***** out of your mouth.

the fifth month, you awaken confused as to when you left consciousness. you are in a wooded area, there is a phone stuck to the tree, and you can see the phone vibrating. you answer, though you cannot hear, the leaves on the trees begin to fall off and make out the words of those on the other end. it is the last words of all your friends, the words they screamed after they realized they would never see you again. you try to expel the words that you wished to tell from your chest, from your lungs, but the blood is still oozing within your throat. you are hopeless. you drop the phone and climb the tree hoping to see some type of sea that could help you be free.

the sixth month, you are drug out of the tree by the demons that you began to believe loved you. they drag you out to a sea, they throw you in it, the salt burns the holes where your ears once were. while under water, you see every fetus you will never have, every broken bottle that touched the lips of those you love, every bit of ash from the cigarettes that killed the good cover the sea floor. you have forgotten how to swim and the light is beginning to fade, someone, something, pulls you out. deja vu of exiting your mothers womb washes over you.

the seventh month, a book of every word you ever spoke is placed upon the dirt of the sea bank. you sit in silence and reminisce with your own history book. you can hear the waves, you realize the salty sea fertilized your eardrums, your ears are back in tact. you find some unsettling peace in this place. this month seems so short. so distant. so incessant.

the eighth month, you are drug into a room by those ******* demons again. in the room is every god you've ever known of. they convince you that you were never evil, that your omens were not the demons you have met, they tell you that there is future, there is light. they tell you that you can return. they spend the first three weeks dwelling on the positive things you placed into the world. during the last week, they explain their personalities, each of them, their multiple personalities. they expound on their traits, and god do these traits sound so **** familiar. jesus hangs from the ceiling, and jesus tells you that there was no light, no truth, only the trees. the ******* trees. jesus tells you that he died for himself, not for you, not for them, not for his father. he died for himself, to remove his own weight of pain. god sheds a tear, buddha holds his hand, mother nature hands you a bouquet of wildflowers. they vanish shortly thereafter.

the ninth month, you are still locked in the same room. you realize the room is actually just one solid mirror, the floor, the ceiling, the walls. you realize you were seeing reflections of yourself the entire time, you realize you were speaking to yourself. you realize you actually could speak, that you weren't choking on your own blood. you stare into your own eyes, you ask god for forgiveness. the room goes black.

you awaken in a hospital bed with a bouquet of wildflowers in your hand and a notebook the size of a bible on your chest. you open the notebook and page after page is every ending note you had ever wrote.

you flip to the back cover of the notebook.
it reads: you are forgiven.

I have been listening to Flatsound so much that I think Mitch Welling may have possessed my chest and taught me all of the wrong ways to say I love you.

My membrane is a flower and too many people have plucked my petals from the stem.
I ripped out all of the pages that had scripture in them, scripture that told stories of who I was back then, scripture I had written with a broken pen.

I kept your voice in a box that's in the attic, it's safe inside a headache, it still sounds nothing less than tragic.
Remember my hands and how they shook when you took everything away, when the demons weren't at bay,
when I screamed for them to stop but still, continually,
everyone's been taken away,
so when people stay please understand that I have to push them away like waves from the shore and ****, I know that's clichè but I'd rather die than let them live in my heart for only a few days.
They still try to talk and I reverberate about how it's unholy to say my name that way, it's unholy to keep me in the fade.
It's unholy to remember me by my eyes and not by my lies.
I have good alibis and it's nothing but true when I say that
I forgot what love means,
I believe it's an illusion that most people just dream, they told me I'm crazy but **** I think I've had more nightmares than dreams so I would know better than to keep my lonely stem stuck in bad weather.

They're over there seducing themselves now, they're seducing themselves with medication that leads to hours of a permutation of all the items in her chest, he leads her to a mutation of what he thinks is best.

I only weep between sheets.

They're far too confident in their self extraction and I just don't understand how that happens, how self absorption can lead to something so terrifying, placing yourself in a box so you can delegate yourself, you're too delicate, it's not good for your health.

That voice inside that box talks in third person now, it says you're not doing too well.

I loved the walls I told my story to every night, they were so very, very white. They ended up with holes and cracks in them but they taught me how to love, they taught me French was a language of passion, and they showed me your reflection in five years, they showed me your foreboding fears and drug laced tears.

It didn't look too good for you.

I wrote my poems along the cracks, I tried to fill the cracks in with pieces of my heart but it wasn't big enough to fill them and we all knew it from the start.
Now my chest is empty and I'm growing a new one and watering it with things that don't try to **** me.

I'd rather shoot myself in the head and end up dead than end up with a hollow soul again.

The paper I sleep on has leaks from where my chest and my mind try to meet up in between and I just end up throwing up black ink at 3 a.m.

I would rather drink bleach than end up back in this town after I've been released.
There are footprints all over this little cage from everyone we used to hate and all the people you wanted to date and now I just lie awake and awake and awake and it's all fake.

The rhythm from the rhyme is satisfying when you remember why we tried to rhyme, how we taught ourselves to survive off of empty pens and shredded paper, and I remember how many times I told my mom I wanted to die that night.

The walls know my secrets, I tore them down, my heart leaked out like the tears from my sieve-eyes on all of those tragedy filled nights, my best kept secrets are long gone now and I'm sure I'll get asked once or twice about those secrets that float through the shadows of past, but I look at them as more than sand in an hour glass, something like the sand on the shore that the sea eats when it gets sore.

The welcome sign has our names on the back of it but you can cross mine out or cover it up with someone new because my heart isn't here and my heart isn't through and I'm feeding it a hopeful story about a girl that once knew you.

I forgive, I forgive, and you'll probably never forgive me for how easy I can forget.

I will write these words with all that I have, and I will beg for your sake and not mine to be let down time and time again, to fall forty feet and hit the concrete until it's dyed red. I am not a delicate human, I am not someone who can sit still, I will fill my lungs and body with fire and desire, I will **** the good to spite the bad and beg the good to come back,
baby come back.

I don't want to be like the one I hate, I don't want to hurt everything in the way of me, I don't want to be a selfish broken thing, I don't want to be this, but I am scared, and very few care to hear that because I've said it for years, and I know how exhausting it must be to try to heal me.
But I never ******* asked for your attempts.
It's exhausting to see the sun and acknowledge it's presence, how you wish it could make you feel. It's exhausting to feel your chest close off and your lungs collapse for minutes at a time because something isn't going right, it's exhausting to refuse love and induce yourself into a numb coma of emptiness and lies and black voids for words. Everything I say means nothing, for I am empty, I am empty until I get stung. I get stung and I am scared.
I am scared to feel, I am scared to love.
I am so ******* scared to love anyone.
I am scared to be left.
I am just scared.
I am so scared and it is nauseating.

I **** up,
I make mistakes,
I am unreeling and I am learning
and I am young
and I am exploding
and trying and wanting
and I am also so haunted.
I don't know how to fight off my demons unless it evolves unspeakable things, but I sure as hell know how to summon them too constantly, I sure as hell know how to play with them and make them love me, I know how to manipulate them to where they don't want to leave.
I'm scared they never will.

I don't want to be saved,
I want to drown, I want to fall, I want to escape.
I want to be resurrected by your hate.
I want to be love in a really ugly place.
I don't need this. I never did.
I am sorry for being this way but love,

I'm not sorry for being me.

You've got to promise not to click on me
It's not high it's empathy
I don't know what you're trying to tell me
Abstract faces on the wall
Sagittarius
Rainbow
Fall
Salty sun
*** on the moon
Lost in the covers
Whisper about how you'll b be gone soon
Disturb the noise
Silence the sound
**** her brains out until you can't figure it out
Eyeball doorknobs
Debase her

I braved the mark of God and the Devil on each side of my ribcage,
an empty spot in my chest,
a heart that was never whole on the left
Unmarked by flesh but made by rose petals and battery acid,
brimstone, muck,
shadows that weren't just shadows, reflections of blue eyes and purple circles, veins that weren't normal colors,
doubt but certainty that this is me,
this is it,
this is all of me.
People talk.
There is a uniformed unity that swallows the red sea behind our eyes and the sea,
it leaks out through cracked pursed lips like a Russian lullaby,
the branches of love and hate permeate a scent so sweet that when it touches your nose you begin to beg God to take you home to the place you felt the afterglow of all of the people you know against the wall and in the picture frames and under the kitchen sink,
Ones vomiting lines of songs after drinking bottles of where they went wrong,
Coming down off of a high of lies from rails of love that weren't cut thin enough,
Seeking resilience after being hammered into the pavement by a hand that believes in ****** and grief and
Hiding your metaphors under the sheets you once slept
beneath,
Drifted,
Drowning your last bit of
bitter
in the river under the bridge
you
spray painted
"God doesn't exist"
on;
Running from everyone.
Around the house there are keepsakes of everything that reminds me of the way my skin is my bandage and everything underneath is an
open wound that has never healed
and every time the bandage is tampered with
the
wounds
get
bigger.
Asphyxiating the roots that link everyone and everything, asphyxiating my heart,
asphyxiation of me,
this is how it should be.
Silent and shivering
Ripe with nothing
Raw with all of our sieves leaking,

we must remember we're still breathing.

i believe your heart is just overgrowth sworn to a secret oath of her bleach stained teeth, what was and what never will be. i sleep with buckets beside my bed and tear stained pillow cases and a knife under one of my mattresses. i wake up with a head heavy with dread and most early mornings i feel like i could be dead, but i know that i'm not because the knife is still under my bed.
and she kissed my forehead in my sleep and i held his hand under the tree where in real time people never meet, junkies just take turns staying there and sleep. i held a heart there. i held it in my hands and it was beating until there was something like a scream, i still think it was the wind.



the way the sunset skips some houses is really prophetic for the way some families in those houses become too broken to be noticed. the way the tops of the mountains can be seen on the darkest nights at times helps me understand the sounds the strings make and the sounds small creatures make when they awake. this chest is full of unmeasurable emotion that gave so many the notion that i don't know how to love, only curse the things that can't curse me back. i am skillful at allowing you to know my eyes and know my lies and the truth is i will never love anyone like i love the way i can make them love me late at night. i will never love. love never. never enough.

months ago on a friday night the bouquet of different memories we passed around was haunted by this idea that we could extract all of the hard parts from ourselves, all of the sad parts, and create god with it. everyone fell asleep that night and i went outside and buried this bouquet because i know that if there is such a god, he is sadder than all of us. we could never recreate something that's already been made with such disgrace to be full of anymore distaste, so we won't. we never will. our voices stay shrill now and some nights our ghosts steal our voices and run away to be near this tree, and they scream and scream and scream.

i have been searching for a home, for a memory, for a friend, for a certain love in people since day one. i have found myself like putty in the palms of people who only wanted to mold me and shape me to be what they wanted me to be. i have mistaken lust for true love and some form of care. i have mistaken the wind for a hug more times than i can count. the thing that scares the living **** out of me is that i don't know when i will stop, when i will change, when i will forget, or
if i even can. what scares me even more is that i am afraid i will never be able to forget. you see, i have a hole inside of my heart, inside of my soul, a hole that ***** away at my brain minute by minute. i have a hole that i fear will never ever be filled for as long as i walk this earth, and let me tell you, the hole is a lot like a wound. sometimes it will go numb and i will forget for a small amount of time, but **** if i don't always end up remembering. the hole burns. it aches. and some days it's enough to make me want to die, right then and there. but i keep going with the hope that one day i will find that missing piece. i will find that solace. far too many people have tried and still want to fill that hole; they want the crown, they want to know they've fixed the broken record, the broken mirror. what they don't understand is that they are mud, not filament. they infect my wound. they make it larger. they make it hurt more. i swear to god i've tried everything to fill this hole, and when i say everything, i mean EVERYTHING. I have this darkness seeping out of it, seeping out of my being, and the light can't quite keep away this darkness for good. i can never quite **** my demons to hell, though i am their own god and should have full control over them. they live in the shadows of this hole. they play with those who dare to try to fill it, including me. my only hope left is to find that missing piece. to find that lost cause and that entrapped little girl. i think she's under the sun somewhere, but the problem is i'm not sure if these demons can take that too well. i hope that someday we find the acceptance, i hope that someday we can find the filament, because i fear that if we don't find it soon, the demons will make this hole larger and larger to where it isn't just a hole anymore, to where it becomes my entire being, my existence. it's soon to be that i am nothing but the open wound, where i am left with nothing but becoming like those i fear, or worse: those i love. becoming dead, metaphorically and soon after, literally.

Keep a carbon copy of all of my deepest secrets,
I've come to understand that my feelings are meaningless.
Empty porch swings and lost engagement rings,
behind closed doors people can be anything
She broke your heart and she broke my smile
Tooth decay and sad denial.

Your noose is in my closet next to my Sunday's best
This house and my chest are just one huge mess.
I don't know what they made of it,
what they thought or what they think
But at least now they're all happy due to the separation of everything.

If the clouds collapsed to the ground and turned into nothing but dust,
would the love that you make in them be anything more than lust

Cross my fingers.
Close my eyes.
Clean off my wrists.
I don't remember how to cry.

They treat her skin like it's ******* and her tongue like it's ecstasy and her fingers like they're needles shooting up their veins with misguided entropy, but it's really just her poisonous lies she hides behind and things they'll never see buried inside that they become addicted to.
They swear they can quit, they swear they'll get clean, they know girls like that are bad, they're not someone your mother would want you to see. All she leaves them with are some track marks and a broken heart.

The sunlight looked like moonlight at 2 in the afternoon and the way my skin looked when the light hit it through the blinds made me lose sense of reality and track of time. The moonlight and my pale skin are the exact same shade and it's not just a coincidence she has the same name. Eventually the night actually came but the moon shed no light, I was surrounded by darkness and memories that fly around my head screaming their goodbyes. Ghosts that dance on the walls and replay in front of me, I was entrapped by the past and put off by the future and everything is a long line of suture.

The whole time I was haunted, I was begging for something enchanting. Grasping for something to hold on to but all of the handles in this lifetime are already being held onto or they're broken. I let it go in the dark like this was all a false start. I could see the track marks she left on your arms, they reminded me of the stars.

I don't want money. I want to be an activist. I want to help other people. I want there to be no little girl or boy that feels like they don't belong in a classroom because they don't fit in or their teachers don't appreciate or believe in them enough. I want little girls to grow up knowing they can be anything they want to be. I want them to grow up knowing that Prince Charming isn't guaranteed but their rights and their education, their future and their body belonging to them and only them, is guaranteed. I want little boys to grow up knowing that they don't have to be the way society has taught them to be for far too long and that they too, can be anything they dream of. I want them to be able to want to study astrophysics and anatomy and not be ashamed. I want them to be able to write something soft and share it without their faces turning red or create a fashion line without being seen as feminine. I want them to know that they don't have to choose alcohol and lust like their some of their fathers did and that smiling isn't a sign of weakness. I want homeless people to believe in themselves in a way they've never been able to, I don't want to see people on the street and I don't want to hear about how everyone on the street only wants money for drugs. I want there to be real help and rehabilitation for drug addicts that doesn't coincide with being thrown in a jail cell so that little kids don't have to grow up without a mom or a dad because, or worse, with a mom or a dad or both that cannot get clean because they have a real problem. It isn't fair to hope for a person who made you and see them fail your entire life because they never got the necessary help. I want religions to respect each other. I want there to be help for mental illness, and I mean real help, which goes along with drug addiction in a lot of ways as well. I don't want there to be oppression because of the color of people's skin or their gender. I don't want to have to hear about a new school shooting because people that should not have access to automatic/assault weapons do have access to them. I want to see more women in the film industry. I want to hear more girls screaming songs and playing noisy riffs. I want to sing my songs and play my noisy riffs on a stage someday and inspire someone the way I've been inspired. I want literature to mean something again and I want poetry to be graffiti'd on the walls of corporations. I want to see flowers on every corner and more trees in places there haven't been in a long time. I want my fingers to bleed paint and I want the world to be my canvas and I want that for many other people too. I want everyone who has felt like me or many others that I know to know they're not alone. I want people to recognize that suicide rates increase almost hourly. I want people to realize white privilege is a thing, and I want people to realize we do not live in the worst country in the world nor the best country in the world. I want people to at least show the slightest bit of love to the president regardless of their own personal opinion. I want the kids in this country to be able to interact with the kids in other countries. I want to see different cultures blooming and coexisting together. I want to see unity. I want to see an end to hatred and a new beginning to love. I want to see less lies in the media and journalism and more honesty. I want the radio to stop telling girls how boys want them to be. I want girls to start deciding for themselves how they want to be. I want older generations to start being less apathetic. I want to see less processed foods and more organic foods going into our bodies. I want people to stop seeing animals as trophies or their three meals a day, and see them as the beautiful living and loving creatures that they are, and I don't mean that everyone has to cut meat out of their diet, just that they should appreciate these beautiful little things that aren't that different from us. I want us to stop killing our home, this garden that gives to us.

I want a perfect world as most people would see it. But I really just want this planet and these insanely beautiful creatures known as humans to be able to stay here for longer than it looks like we will at this point.

I want to make a difference, that's all I really want.

A difference is all we all really need.

I need to leave.
The dust and wild air need to enter my lungs
I need the taste of freedom to touch the tip of my tongue.
I need freedom to run his finger tips down my thighs,
kiss me over and over,
make me sigh.
I need your past to be left there and I need her ghost to stop following you everywhere, I need you to stop swallowing it up and giving me that blank stare.
The blood in my veins and the flesh covering my bones will never be the same as the last place you really called home.
I hope she finds her way back to you, I really do,
I don't want to see you suffer anymore and I don't want to go down with you too.
I know you love her more than me and I know I'm incomplete.
But believe me when I say this isn't how I will be.

I'm just some wannabe eighteen year old who's been taught a lot just by making moans,
those who taught me made me swear by a secret oath.
I lost the real me underneath a tree in the cool October air, I lost my integrity and it's probably buried in one of the graves there
I refuse to dig it back up, it was too weak to stay, I've been building a new one since that last day.

You taught me that people never really get over their first loves
maybe that's why I'm always so drunk. I used to drink coffee every hour but I traded it for a something a lot more stout, something everyone else sees me swallow and then sends their condolences and doubt.
The poison makes more sense than reality and the unforced fists,
the poison creates more forget,
and no matter what I know romance doesn't exist
.
I know I'm a *****, I never said I was kind,
to all of the people who are shocked, I don't understand why you're so blind. All I am is ink and paper,
nicotine and liquor,
a buzz mistaken for love,
a child that left everyone completely and utterly ******.

People over fantasize being next to a person in a bed at 3 a.m.
they see it as some sort of grand gesture of love,
when the reality is that during those hours you can finally feel the distance and the realization of how nobody ever truly gives a ****.
Nobody knows anyone. Ever.
Your parents, your friends, your gas station clerks, Walmart greeters, cousins, brothers and sisters.
You're just a face and that's all you'll ever be,
you're nothing more than God and nothing less than me.
It hurts to die, nobody knows what happens after that grand little exit,
but it hurts worse to live with all of these bad habits.
I don't believe everyone knows sin the way I do. So many different lips have found their way down my body after 10 o'clock at night, but the first time I felt yours on my lips, everything felt right. But I'm scared that I could be wrong, and I'm even more scared that I could be right.
The girl who spent every night with a different boy now has one that she truly wants to be with for the rest of her life.
I keep trying to run and I keep trying to hide, because it's scary to be me when the most prominent word in my vocabulary is goodbye.
Baby believe me, I love you more than any cliches about the moon and the sea, I love you more than any pill, cigarettes, or cheap whiskey. I love you with the fire in my chest and all of the holes where it makes it's ruby red nest. I know this is all so far fetched and unfair to you, but I'm still scared that I'm nothing more than a body to **** in attempt to fill in the holes within you.

I hope that your love is more than just a phrase,
I know I'm only eighteen but I feel much older than my age.
I hope your love wants to stick around until my ******* angst completely leaves, I hope it want to follow me through the years and spend the rest of its life with me.
I know I'm young and wild and also far too naive.
I know for a fact that you're so far beyond me.
I know I can sound vacant and immature.
I know I **** up and go crazy and make everything obscure.
I know I can't see clearly and more or less run from everything that's not alcohol or drugs.
Sometimes all I want is to get drunk off your love, but most of the time I'm just left with a buzz.
Your thoughts are bigger than anything anyone can comprehend, your existence is the best thing I've witnessed since time began.
Your skin against mine feels the same way the first bite Eve took out of the apple must have been so ripe and raw with taste.
I fear I'll be left out as waste.
I know your love has just as much fear as mine, and I'm sorry you have to witness my deepest sins being sung lullabies.

There is a defining thing for me at this point, and that's that I have learned to live for art. I have learned that people are too faulty and fickle. So many fall into themselves and crumble like a poorly made sculpture, and I know that I can always try to rebuild them, but trust me when I say I've tried so many different times that by now I know they'll be different each time.

I stopped telling people my problems and my stories and I encased what "dead silence" is to the point where the silence that I radiate scares some people. The way I'm bad at crying and laughing and feeling makes some people run the opposite direction. If only you people could understand that the words bleed out onto paper as metaphors and the feelings are different shades of paint that you'll never be able to pinpoint as the right emotion. It's just that drawing paper and canvases and notebook paper and landscapes listen a lot better than so many of those **** things with their ears, and my hands are much better at telling things than my mouth is. The sounds of non-existent chords I play and the ambiguity behind the hums are not something I can explain to you, they're just a way I can talk without speaking.

I am bad at committing to anything except myself, dying, and these songs.

The way they talk, they let me know that it's becoming too hard to love someone who doesn't talk as much as they should, it's hard to love a puzzle when there's so many missing ******* pieces and no picture to look off of.
If only they understood.

Remorse in the way your older brothers taught you right from wrong when they told you to stay away from their friends and them.
Laughter in the way the moon told me jokes while she was sleeping beside you,
guilt in the way that I taught you how to drown while your were trying to teach me how to swim,
death in the way you lose people who are still alive.

Absence, the way my father was absent from my life the way a child with cancer would be absent from school.
Horror, the way she probably screams and writhes with your body, and here I am screaming and writhing with a blade again.
Empty, the way my body was on August 25, 2014.
Full, the way the bottles never were.
Dread, the last breath of desire.
Happy, the way I was on the day it rained and your mother forgot my name.
Broken, like the skull of the animal I ran over the other night.

Love, love me like I love inflicting new wounds upon myself,
tolerate the way her breath doesn't make you moan when it moves down your neck,
my breath was like a ghost.

Sadness like that first day of February.
Time change like a car wreck you can't look away from, we call it depression here.

Family.
The way blood means nothing and smiles from strangers mean everything.

First phase:
Car windows, cold ones, winter. You were three. To this day from time to time you'll put your fingertips against the glass because it reminds you of simple things from the past. You always thought the world looked looked like it was unhappy from back seats, like it was reflecting your own complacency.

Phase two:
Narcolepsy. You can't stay awake anymore because when you're awake it's like you're dreaming and surrounded by reclusiveness and weeping and when you're asleep it's like you're alive and you're hearts still beating.

Phase three:
Car windows, nonexistent, summer.
You were five, nine, ten, thirteen, fourteen, sixteen, and seventeen.
Songs. Nostalgia. Windows. Sun. Sticky air, air that smothers you. Smiles with people you love. Songs. Those **** songs.

Phase four:
Punching walls, kicking objects, throwing breakable things, slamming doors. Screaming so loud you make yourself cry.
I learned from the best.

Final phase:
Leaving.

morrissey said "to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die" and donnie darko said "every living creature on earth dies alone"
and maybe we're thrusting ourselves ourselves into the unknown
but from what i know the birds tell us stories with their wings and the sky is a lot more beautiful than his hands ever were to me and the overgrowth in the woods holds more passion than my eyes do some nights
when we walk through this world, we are doing so alone

to die on your own is a way most people don't want to go.

we have shipwrecks in our hearts and thunderstorms under our fingernails and sometimes i swear to god i can hear the rain in your exhale and highways never come to a complete end so why should we

comatose linked to these tombstones and the way you never understood what her eyes were saying when her lips couldn't move
i keep thinking back to the sunday mornings i found god in and i see the exasperation staining my knees from all the pleas i was sending back to me

maybe we have to see our own blood on the pale white concrete before we can understand what love is or what the sunset really means and i guess i'm saying i lost so many parts of me that i mopped up the blood and rung it out into the veins of a creature you'll never meet

to die in the passengers seat of a car with your heart on your sleeve and their saliva still on your lips is the way most people want to give death it's first kiss

we are brooding through the wavelengths of familiarity and unfamiliarity all at once and we chant deja vu when we meet someone new because they say the last thing you see when you die is those you love so what do we do when we **** the things we once knew and love all things brand new

to die by my own side is such a heavenly way to say goodbye.

if the doomsday clock has gotten closer to midnight, shouldn't i live my life like it's only mine?

i understand there are people here who love me, and i love them too, but there's just so much to see and so much to do. if i feel like leaving, if you truly love me you should be okay with that. if i disappear and go out into the world and experience things and follow my passions and where my heart takes me, i think that's okay. if the world is ending so soon, i want to have done everything that i can do to rid myself of the complete darkness i have been engulfed in for seventeen years. i want to experience new people, places, and things.

it would never be goodbye because everyone i love would always still be a part of me, a part of my heart, and i would eventually return.

but i am young, and i have until the clock strikes midnight to make my mistakes, to fail, to learn, to grow, to experience. i have never in my entire life considered staying in arkansas, i have never considered being normal, i have never considered growing old with someone, i have only known that i expect above average, and a love within myself and everyone else.

i am young as said before, a seventeen year old girl who is wise for my age, but i know i'm not as wise as i'd like to think i am sometimes. i want to experience different places, i want out of here. i believe i should not be held back and i will not be held back when i turn 18.

you see, there's something waiting for me on a beach by the sea, there's something in that air that will set me free and i need to inhale it, i need to exhale everything that's trapped inside of me, i need to be free.

i need to be free. i need to be free. i need to see the real me.
here's to eighteen and 2015.

they were screaming more, more
i was screaming and slamming the doors
i was crucified on a bed post
loneliness is the lover of the broken hearted and those with brittle bones
loneliness takes hold and takes control and teaches you things most will never know
i combined myself into thirty different people one night, they called it an overdose
overdose of understanding
overdose of emotion
overdose of psychosis
i'm a ******* ******.
i keep staring at the sun screaming for an answer, screaming for the reason, there was never one to begin with
what happens happens
what was and what will has no meaning other than all of the gleaming little theories we made up
we try to hide our naked souls with ****** expressions that paint our faces like make up
i woke up with scars all over me one morning thinking the previous night had been torturous, thinking it **** nearly killed me
i learned that the scars were just stretch marks from where love made its way into my body and dispelled hate
love took hold of me and removed all that once was, what we thought would be
when the briars leave my body teach me how to love softly
teach me how to love softly
teach me that i am more than a body
teach me how to love softly

Butane lungs,
forty different faces, too many of them too numb.
Too many cups, too many cups, too many times I've called your bluff.
Stop your eyes from fallacies and incoherent lies, stop your mouth from the ******* that's falling out.
Inconceivable pacifism and flower petals made out of eyelashes and dead skin.
I don't want to go through this again.

Complicate the scales, complicate your lengthy tales, complicate the way she says your name, complicate the way I have too many finger prints on my veins.

Stop slitting wrists, go for the bruised knuckles and ****** fists.
Stop slitting wrists, go for the bruised knuckles and ****** fists.
Smile like there is no such thing as goodbye, smile while your teeth fall out, smile while you die.
Keep your eyes peeled, keep your eyes open with blood shot lies.
Covering yourself in lucid dreams, covering yourself in water it seems, covering yourself in pieces of me.
I'm too ****** up, I swear to God the Devil knows this isn't how I wanna be.
Overtime, over the night, over time, over night, under your flashlight, shadowed with with regret, I was never a satisfying bet.
There have been too many times that I've heard the phrase, "Darling, you're possibly the darkest person I've ever met."
I just talk to the ceiling and tell it about how I hope you never forget.
But I know this is it, I know I know I know, I know because you already forgot.

As an infant there was always more tears than laughter and despondent empty eyes from people who were supposed to look at me with eyes full of future and love. The first thing babies automatically know how to do regularly is not smile or laugh, but cry.  
I'm not sure if we all cried for our sins in our past lives or for the ambiguity of the life we were entering.

There were empty rooms in that house, too many for me to count. It always smelled like coffee in the mornings and we made shadow puppets on the walls, he taught me how to make butterflies with my hands before I knew how to love.

Maybe the shadows were made out of needles instead of hands.

Our first best friends are rarely the ones we see beside us on our graduation day or cheering us on at the altar. The ones who kissed our skinned knees with such innocence when our parents weren't around during our first year of school are not the ones that kiss our bruised hearts and broken minds when we lose our stability later in life when nobody is around.

I remember your eyes.

It wasn't the ocean, it was a knock off. It was the most beautiful piece of something cheap compared to a million dollars of crystalized beauty, maybe you saw that thing you love(d) so dearly within it and that's why we went there so much, but it will always be framed inside of my mind. You left the car when I looked at the trailer trash sea from the back seat like it was the most golden beach. The sunset reflected the pulse from the bodies that would be close to mine later in life. I've never felt a sunset like I did on that day. The highway was a different shade of gray on the ride home. I haven't seen that color since.

The first insults feel like bullet holes and sound like nails on a chalk board. You learn with age that you are only what you see yourself as, you are not these combinations of letters and sounds and syllables used to make yourself turn against yourself.

I remember the light on the front porch and the way the air felt. I remember the way I barely saw your face and the way your voice cracked. I remember I kept my body in the warmth and my head outside in the cold where your entire body was, and maybe that's why my head hasn't been right ever since. I remember feeling something sad and not understand why and realizing almost every day since then that goodbye's can be forever and not just see you later's.

We will throw our caps in the air, and there will be a barrier with many cracks in it between me and what once was. There will be an open road with forevers laced like a dotted line straight down the middle in front of me and I will scream goodbye to the sound of my favorite songs,
and I'm sorry, but I don't know how long I'll be gone.

I'm an empty room with no paint on the walls
Filled with broken hopes and empty thoughts
The wood is caving in and people come through to see and touch
As soon as they linger too long they realize the empty room upsets them too much
They hear ventriloquists song, the wood carving words as silent nursery rhymes and shallow one verses lullabies
The windows are broken and the wind waltzes in, it towers under the floorboards and swallows the bad parts in
Schizophrenic slumber parties with sandman and death, fascist following of whoever is next
The vines slither in, deceivingly vile, stealing all the smiles and sorrowful trials of the men in their nightgowns and high heels so tall, everything started to grow so small
The table outside the door has a bottle of the last person to exits drug of choice, it makes it worth the while

i've been walked like a dog with the noose around my neck used as a leash and stabbed with a sword dripping wet with regrets. these retreats stain the pages i emptied my heart out onto, kind of like the kids my age with those glass bottles do.
the only difference is while they're throwing up all of that poison at four in the morning, i'm throwing up your name, every last bit of shame, and the parts of me that i will never reclaim. they wake up with a headache and a hangover on sunday afternoons but i've woken up with same one everyday for the past four months that comes from something that was probably just lust.

the thing is, i'm getting better.
you can see my lips curve like the slight waves in a lake on a rainy day instead of looking so flat like the boards of the floor inside an old abandoned house that resembles my heart.
you can see the sparkle in my eye like the spark on a lighter when you're trying to set your lungs on fire instead of pieces of sheet metal that you can see hell reflected into.

every once in a while i'll have a thought of you, and then i remember her too,
and i know you're not the person i once knew.
i smile these days and we both know that i never used to.
i hope when you see a graveyard you think of me and know that the memories of you are now buried six feet underneath me.

when my father left my body in the living room floor, my mind followed him into the darkness. i hid under the cracks beneath the doors, i swallowed my pride and split my understanding in half. to this day, i always try to find the other half of my understanding beneath the doors of empty rooms.

2. i saw your smile in a reflection of the moon in mud puddle. beauty can be reflected into the saddest, most seemingly vile things.

3. my apologies are endless, i suffer from being mistakenly unforgiven. i whisper my apologies underneath doors to empty rooms sometimes.

4. we broke our hearts and set them all apart, shadows, unspoken, never understood, never repaired. open armed, empty handed, left rusted instead of the golden color we began with.

5. there will always be a chill in the air from now on, even on the hottest of days.

6. goodbye begins, but nothing ever really ends. everything lives on somewhere. everything is intertwined, even newborns and wine.

7. cracks beneath doors.

8. apologies.

9. pine needles.

10. goodbye.

Crown made out of needles
Noose made out of love
Emptiness more holy than addiction
Liquid static that leaves a broken buzz
Flowers growing through cracks on the windows
Air more bitter than your goodbye
Smoke floating through the air
Mid summer, humid July
Blood highlighting your cheekbones
My body was made out of stone
You see yourself as humble, but there's nothing inside your body but bones

Ripping the sheets in a fit of rage
Locked inside of your flooded cage
Praying for a drought but the only thing in my life for fourteen days was rain

Scowls from across the city
Hugs in attempt to defeat the bitter
He hit her
It still grips her, still collapses her, it makes her so ******* bitter
Take another sip and make fists
Give her another kiss
Another bit of flesh

Sleeping with your self pity, staining your pillows with every little thing that went wrong
Singing lullabies to open flesh before the sun even set while they begged you to come home
I watched you **** yourself in the basement, I watched through the cellar door, I watched you remove everything you had left, I watched you and it taught me to hate myself even more
Defiling everything that was left, everything you look back and wish you would have kept, but you're bereft of everything and theft is your favorite daughter
He still keeps your lies in his pocket, your favorite son is long gone,
we don't believe in forgiveness here, if there's a hell you don't even deserve to be there and your lover will take you there, with arsenic soaking her hair
The flies swarm your chest, the maggots fill her womb, you're breeding and breeding and creating nothing but flesh destined for doom

i'm driving down the road listening to the songs you used to listen to and for a second it feels like you're still here with me, like you're still present. the moment is still, and you never left.
then i feel the air drift through the window and it reaches my hand and grabs it the way you would have if you are there and i am reassured that my lover is only a ghost these days.
some nights i scream at the lines in the center of the highway for being too perfect and i bet she's spending her night same way, only screaming about how perfect you are while you lay her down gently.
some mornings i wake up with this weight laying on my chest, on my lungs, holding me down from enduring the day. she's probably holding you down with that same weight on your chest, but with a good morning kiss. the ones you would accept from me.
there are small bits of blood on my carpet and i don't remember how they got there.
all i ever will be is a concept to get them through their nights, to get them through their lows, to give them their highs.
when i met you, i painted the walls of my heart with what i thought love looked like and they never really dried.
my veins tell stories better than my lips, and my tears have more lust than anything near my hips.
i keep having these nightmares and I keep "waking up" from them but they never go away.
does she have pretty fingernails?
i wrote an apology for not being sane enough on my chemistry text last wednesday and i tried to rewrite it on my wrist but you couldn't really make out the i'm sorry's, they looked more like i'm sad's so maybe i should have used a pen instead.
it's 12:52 a.m. and all i can think about is how she's probably beside you, and you're probably telling her all the empty promises you left me with and she's probably eating them for the fourth time with the seventh guy in eleven months and i'm sorry that i wasn't enough.
please don't ever talk to my tombstone.

Broke the seal, came to kneel
Carry me through everything you feel
Shallow water, sunken sea
Broken fists and ****** knees
Safe and sound, keep holding me while I drown
I reflect the needles, fistful of pens, take me back to the only place I understand
The safety was never on, the gun has always been loaded and the blood looks like velvet while it runs down the staircase
This is desperation and demise with a smiling face
Playing with God,
Talking him up,
I heard you invited him over for dinner
and asked him to ****
I heard he denied you, told you that you weren't good enough,
you swallowed your pride and then you called me up.
I sunk into the staircase, bled into the floorboards, colored the walls with my shadows, the basement ceilings drippings spelled out stupid *****.
Cut off your ears to spite your mom, cut out your tongue because you know you're ******* ****.
**** all of your enemies, it's only suicide, remember how it costs nothing to lie and everything to die.
Thoughts in the fade, skies swallowed in grey, it never rains and around here we don't believe in pain.
Vibrate this name with your vocal chords and no tongue, beg God to take you back when I'm done.

as a child she got lost in the woods
she received a more assuring hug from the wind than anyone who had ever said they loved her
the flowers spoke words with more softness and care than any human around her ever had
and before she found her way out of this woods she spotted a hollow tree where she placed her heart

after many years the girl went back into the woods
the wind was dry and smelled of burning wood
the flowers were wilted
dead
and that tree had rotted leaving nothing but roots and the veins from her heart

the girl now resembles the tree the first time she saw it
you do not know if that is curse or a blessing
a human so incapable of loving that she breaks everything in her path that dares to attempt to fill the hollow place in her chest with words and beauty she hasn't seen since the day that she gave her heart to that tree or a human so incapable of loving she lives without the fear of a broken heart
only an empty void

I feel it in my blood
Something misunderstood
Differentiating my existence and anxious fits
Compelling my dark blue mind and everything I hide behind
Impale me on your absorbing pathological mind state
Resurrect me on your inexplicable time frame
Redirect me to something a little less insane
Find me tucked beneath the darkest parts of your membrane
I can't feel, therefore I'll never heal
I'm stuck somewhere that shows how I can't even remember what brought me to kneel
Absence and existence, abolition to everything that they made me sick with
Doubt
Discovery
Disregard to you
Self absorption through me
Writing these ******* fallacies and blood on the wall
I never fell, just remembered how you taught me the worst things I recap
You were too aware to fall
Too complacent to install yourself into all that I lost
I got so lost
I was never completely found
Nothing makes sense because I'm so far behind
So far behind the time frame you created and the time frame that is so tame
Everything that makes you complain
Moan a little more, baby boy, your tears don't sound like pleasure
You make my pleasure sound like pain
Keep on throwing up word ***** about how I'm so insane
Keep unbuttoning her blouse with the thought of my name

Pavement.
Hard asphalt.
Windows without any glass on them.
The Wizard of Oz was my favorite movie,
you made sure I fell asleep safely.
Coffee;
I smelled it too much growing up.
It tastes like nostalgia but the smell makes me sick, it makes me think of all the things I want to forget,
stringy blonde hair, strung out, I will pretend for the rest of my life that I don't care because I know there's nothing to hold my care.
Living room floors;
I've never felt more at home
I've never felt more alone.

I can't remember where I slept.

Stop pretending like you understand because in simplest terms
you just can't.
You can comprehend what it's like to only trust the people who left and the people who are dead instead of the people who are still here, I trust them because they did what I said and they left,
but God
sometimes I wish they would have been there.

Stop shooting up on love,
get help.
Your pupils don't exist.
I exist but it's been dismissed far too many times for me to give a single **** about any of this.
There's a new proverb:
Accept that it's possible for people to love needles more than other people.
It makes open hands turn into fists
and it makes me really really ******* ******.
But I'm not angry.

I am not dark,
I do not have a dark heart,
I'll show you darkness.
I'll let you look under the crack of the bedroom door in a house that would give you sores from just stepping foot through the door.
I'll show you what it's like to cry every night because there are a substantial amount of why's in a pool of what if's that answers never seemed to float in.

But trust me, this is not darkness, this is negative energy touching positive and bouncing off of everything in between, this is it leaving our bodies and begging to be seen,
This is not death, this is not release, this is not about you
or me
this is about the ones who lost it all, this is about the ones who's apologies will never amount to a hug or a new baby doll,
this is for the boys who lost their nerve and chose to find a friend in something unheard,
this is for the girls who wish they could stop, but know they can't handle reality at all,
this is for nobody and everyone all at once,
this is for all of the people I trust.

i am theirs, i am theirs, i am theirs.

his lips touched my neck and they were nothing like yours, they were nothing i had felt before, and in ways i longed for more, but my heart always tells the same ****** up story and i have been left with no open doors.

i am a she, i am she, i am she.

i am a work of art, but only in the sense that i'm one of those canvases with a bunch of pieces of trash stuck to it that is deemed as art.
i smile at the thought of oblivion more than i ever smiled at the thought of what it felt like kissing him.
i keep jars full of the wings of bugs because they're the only proof of a possibility of angels above and i keep my thoughts of you under the kitchen sink to have something to open up and remind me that there's hell when i've had too much to drink.

i am her, i am her, i am her.

he told me that he couldn't keep going because it would feel like abuse,
i never ever got that from you.
this concept of what i am, you can't even understand it.
i am nothing.
i am raw.
raw.
a raw slab of meat.
nobody knows how cook me, to what degree, they can never bite into me and really understand what i am.

i am mine.

make me a dress out of baby's breath, woven together with 424 regrets and i will dance like the gravel that tumbles under your feet as you walk. the friction between the door and the wooden floor doesn't create a spark quite like the unheard voices that fill up cheap wine glasses with bottles of bluff. there's a table with a platter of the last goodbyes of everyone who couldn't keep their hearts on their sleeves instead of putting them back in their chests on a table somewhere, and we're eating these for dinner, resuscitating promises and lies like a new breed of bulimic.

i wake up and the room is always blue with shades of red in the corners and the cracks and i'm breaking my back to not feel so under the weather, but these days i think that even the weather is under the weather. my backbone is callused and faulty, i'm weak with thousands of thoughts of poignant disguises of love and poisonous excuses that explain why i can't find a conclusion. a disease with symptoms such as dissatisfaction with the best parts of myself and attempting to never interact with the bad that leaves a blank canvas and an invisible human in the mirror. all of the sickness keeps me from seeing past the shadows from the bars on this rusty cage.

Maybe Max was just a figment of imagination that the Wild Things used to display themselves into something greater than themselves, a king, a different species than them. Maybe we are all Wild Things, and maybe each day a new one of us is king. We are all ******* crazy but have a desire for life in different ways than anyone else aside from us that I know. Maybe we all just want to be loved, all in different ways and different beliefs but also the same. Maybe the combination of all of our personalities and features, all of our art and all of our emotion makes a king. Maybe Max was the combination of all of the Wild Things as a human. I think that we are a unit, we have the strangest form of unity. It is not a conventional unity, it's a slight dependence, with a mixture of independence. We crave so much from the world and lose touch of ourselves far too often. The pores in our skin have been soaking up the sorrows of the world and those around us and I'm just waiting for the day that all of our pores turn into holes and the mass of light within us explodes through.

for the past three months i have been trying to climb back up to the top of the cliff i fell from a year ago that ended with a ****** mess. i have been trying to reach the top and jump off of it myself instead of being pushed off into a free fall. the other day i reached for the wrong jagged rock and it cut me and i saw my blood and realized that i'm actually still alive, you see, my body and my heart is stronger than i thought. as soon as i realized this i let go and hit the bottom again. as soon as i did i stood up and ran away. when i looked back i realized i had been jumping into a pile of leaves rather than off a cliff and there were remnants of strands of my sweaters and hair everywhere and you couldn't tell the difference between them and i saw a pile of flesh on the ground and soon realized it was your fingers from the hands that once held mine because they broke off your palms like the pieces of my metaphorical heart did. i began running away after the fingers started crawling back towards mine and i know now that i was not made to be held by the hands of another, only to be held by the hands of my ambition. and the pile of last years leaves i had been jumping into soon became a pile of this years leaves and instead of falling into them and hiding i am building crowns out of them for the love that still resides in my life, for the friends, the family, and the familiar faces and important places. i wandered deeper into a path away from the leaves and i impaled the memories upon the antlers of a deer. i was soon shot by a hunter who shot so slowly and skillfully through the center of my heart. i pulled the arrow out. i am not his trophy. my bandaids became highways and conversations with those who seem to be just as broken as me but still laugh like there is a god. i hated the moon for ninety days and the sunrise made me sick. now the sun makes the leaves the color they used to be to me and the moon shines down through the trees. i could only see darkness but now i see that the shadows the moonlight through the trees create are one long withstanding path to my repaired heart and a home within myself.