I love you
I do not say this lightly

I do not mean
As a friend

I mean I'm in love with you
With every little bit

But I distance myself
Because loving you

Loving you the way I do
Is gonna leave me broken

Because while you love me
While you care

You are not in love with me
You do not care for my heart

I'm in love with you
Your eyes gleam

Your smile stings my soul
I need you in every way

I want you in every way
Do not underestimate this

I am in love with you

That is the truth.

...i love you
In the most innocent of forms,
In the way that I hold your hand while sitting in the passenger seat
In the way that Ill run my fingers through your hair when you've had a rough day
In the way my entire body exhales when you wrap your arms around me
And in the way i search for you in every poem I read, every movie I watch, every song that comes on the radio, every photograph
I long to find better words to describe it,
But until then
I just, whole heartedly,
Undeniably, chaotically,
love you.

Poetry just might be love
     or just so the other way around.

I tell you,my dear
a day never passes without,
     (well hardly a day)
without a thought or two of
you and you and you,

bound as we are
      by blood,
              by tears,
       by laughter
or some common dream or enterprise.

You sing in my poems
       and my neurons fire for you.

Either I love you because I cannot forget you
       or the other way around.

So, my love, I offer you this poem.
      (So, my poem, I offer you this love).

*December, 2015

ever since you, I haven't been okay
the way you used to whisper in my ear
the way you used to tell me you loved me
the way you smiled at me
the way you drank your coffee
the way you walked away
the way you told me "I just don't feel the same"
ever since you, I haven't been okay.

You want to know what I think about when I lie in bed at night?
I think about that nasty break up in 2013
How I was so scared to be alone
because I thought I needed a man to feel whole
How I pushed everyone away
because I was angry at the world for being happy
while I was in a million pieces
How I stopped listening to my favorite band
because every song they wrote just reminded me of memories
I couldn't let go of
How I became a *****
because I did the one thing I promised I would never do

I became bitter
I became unrecognizable
I lost myself in my anger and the jealousy of my cousins hands
touching the body I had seen naked everyday for the last two years
I neglected my poetry because I gave up on feeling
I didn't want to be sad
I didn't want to start over
I didn't want to pick myself up because it hurt too much
I spent days doped up on sleeping pills
I went days without showering
I went days without eating because I didn't care about anything anymore
I was depressed
I became heartless
I became mean
I became selfish
All because of a man
who clearly didn't give a **** about me
I spent months blaming myself
as if it was my fault we were over
I wasn't the one who cheated
I wasn't the one who lied
I wasn't the one who got an STD after ******* the biggest ***** in town
I wasn't the one who almost knocked up my best friends girlfriend
I may have had my share of problems
but none big enough to ruin a relationship

The day I woke up from my bitterness
was the day I realized that through all of the ******* I was feeling
I did not once turn to my past addiction for help
In the past cutting would have been my escape
For the first time in my life
I went through something traumatic
without turning to a razor for support
I started asking myself "what the hell is wrong with you?
Letting a man have all of this emotional control over you
He is just like a razor without the ****** mess."
I became disgusted with myself
I started feeling guilty for hurting all of the people I loved
while I spent months being angry
I hit rock bottom
I was as low as a person could get
and I let myself get that way
In that moment I knew that the only way out of my rut
was to face the things I was hiding from
To deal with the aftermath of the worst break up
I had ever gone through
Only I could get through what was to come
Only I could make the choice to change

As I lie here two years later
thinking of that mess
I can't help but feel blessed
I am so thankful for hitting rock bottom
It forced me to grow up
It forced me to clean up my social life
It forced me to reconnect with myself
It forced me to change my life
It helped me fall in love with writing again
I am more in love with writing now
than I have ever been in my life
What I thought was the worst thing that could have ever happened to me
was in fact the best thing that ever happened to me