I hate the fact that
you ruined so many things for me.
Every album you played
while I drove you home
(which made me late for work)
while you showered
(to avoid apologizing)
while I was slowly waking up
(much earlier than preferred)
make up the soundtrack
to every awful thing you made me do.

I hate that when the air outside
feels like fall disguised as spring,
it smells like you laying beside me
bottoming out after a night of Jameson
and me still awake from the previous morning,
dialing the numbers to emergency responders.

I hate that black coffee and marb reds
taste like your mouth
and take me right back
to that bathroom where I hid,
waiting for you to fall asleep,
because you wouldn't let me
sleep in my own ******* bed.

I hate that
I probably still love you
after all you put me through.

My words always move faster
than my fingers,
so there's usually
no way for me to describe
the feeling that rests
in the silence between songs
booming from your car stereo.
But I guess
I would call it:
empty.

The loneliest you can be
is when you're the only one
on the road
at two in the morning.
And so you scream to your songs
just to fill up the space
between you
and the rest of the world.

In the quiet moments
I think about all the things
I would have done
if I wasn't so scared,
and all the times
I did those things,
and it turned out
afterwards
I was still scared.

I feel like I owe this to you,
even though I don't know your last name.
I don't know how you smile
when he tells you that you're beautiful,
and I don't know how you feel inside
when you're both laying in bed at night
after he takes what he doesn't deserve.
I don't know how you'll react
when you're finally honest with yourself
and realize that he is a prizefighter
and being with him is like a boxing match,
that you won't win without a struggle.
And every time the bell sounds
you'll be less and less equip to defend yourself
the longer you allow him
to keep ******* at
your sense of self.

So let me be your cutman,
wiping the sweat from your brow
and strongly suggesting you forfeit;
because eventually
his charisma and charm
will seem like a distant memory
and you'll forget
why you started this fight at all.
I guess I'm just trying to say
get out with your integrity intact,
while you still can,
and I hope
you never have to feel
the way I felt.

Regret rides shotgun,
more often than not,
with this endlessly restless soul.
And impulsivity is the worst kind of backseat driver
while disappointment tilts it's seat back
and waits patiently
for my next big mistake.

I've been thinking a lot
about the past,
and retracing my steps
to find a younger version of myself,
basking in the uncertainty of the future -
with all the conviction of an attorney
delivering the closing statement
that will undoubtedly win the case.
Because
a younger me,
naïve and untouched,
knew something I don't
about what it means to be content.

So as I steer myself and my gripes,
into what looks like a ditch,
I'll wrap my fist around the hope
that's still somehow dangling
from my rearview mirror.

I’m being told to practice honesty,
so honestly,
getting sober kind of really *****
most of the time.
I take my medication every morning,
I go to my meetings at night.
I fill in the spaces with adjectives and nouns and bad reality tv.
I make my phone calls
and attend my appointments
and talk truthfully with the counselors
who have the same credentials as me.

But I float along on my “pink cloud”,
happy to not be bleeding out of my nose
or begging my racing heart
to please, calm down.
I feel things,
maybe less intensely than before
but in a real sort of way,
that isn’t filtered through
whatever I decided to numb myself with.
It’s not exciting, it’s not glamorous,
but I guess I’d rather live this way
than trudge through hell every day
and die a disappointment.

I don't want to die alone,
I truly don't.
Though I scoff at the human race
and use the only strength in my bones
for hatred and beg the world
to erase my every mistake -
deep down I crave the brush
of a finger on my cheek
and the blood rushing through my vessels
closest to the surface.

Hopelessly indebted to
the fleeting feeling of fluttering
the butter on a summer day,
and I bloom.
I guess I love love,
and I would take it like a drug,
I love love;
I just don't love the side effects.
If I'm thinner,
it's because I leave a piece of myself
with every person I meet,
with every place I set roots.
My love rivals the Coliseum,
larger than life and utterly broken.

So I'm always ask for two things:
someone(thing) and the billboard from god
that I can finally be done searching
and I don't have to feel so lonely
anymore.

It always happens this way.
same time, every year,
when the leaves burn red and descend from their perches.
same feeling, like I could be anyone else
but myself.
I could be you,
you’re getting older in a city you now call home,
and thinking of you happy
makes my stomach turn.
Maybe I’m jealous.
Maybe I’m guilty.
Either way, I can still hear your voice
saying something casually poetic
while our unspoken words made me sick.
I’d like to think that every part of you has left me,
and that it’s been long enough to say we never even touched.
And I still can’t decide who the victim really was,
when you’re out there living,
and I’m only pretending.

The last time I was falling,
each memory
a pinprick
Talk into me and fill me
with kind observation
watch them come
and go
untied or cut free,
either way it looks the same
Overfilled
sure to burst
Hold me down or
I might float away
Would you come float
away with me?

I want to love you so bad,
but can I?
It’s been so long
and I’m not sure I remember how.
I know you’re tired,
showboat with all your
peddles and organs.
The years between us,
with your crooked smile from before-
when the air felt darker around me,
colored a deep shade
of midnight blue.

You’re so sweet,
sleeping in my passenger seat
and there’s makeup wiped on
my baseball cap
and I’m sore,
in so many ways.

I want peace for you,
every piece of you.
Close your heavy eyes and
peel off your layers.
Take a deep breath,
and take a sip from my
lip gloss-stained coffee cup
or sleep deeply instead
on the way
driving you home.

Prisms casted rainbows
that danced on the walls
from the mirrored doors my uncle installed
onto my bedroom closet.
Just like that,
the old brown wood was discarded
and, in its place,
a heavier, more durable barrier
between my private belongings
and the hellscape I was forced to inhabit outside of them.

More often than not,
they were a barricade between
what I didn’t want to hear
and the comfort of old dance costumes
and holiday dresses I’d outgrown
all lined up in a row,
soft robes to melt into after a bath
and my trusty, fuzzy pink earmuffs.
I paraded around the house in them,
as a symbol of the silence I desired
or a more obvious cry for help.

I remember when we went to Lake George and didn’t return
and how I didn’t understand why we couldn’t just go home.
I didn’t want to stay on vacation,
I wanted to sleep in my own bed.
I remember smashing my hands
against my ears
to keep out the shouting
and sitting awake in bed,
waiting to hear the garage door to go up,
because then I knew you’d be home
and you’d be safe, and we’d be safe
and we could all fall asleep in the same house,
whether my happily ever after
was based in reality
or a bedtime story I told myself every night
so that I could finally rest my eyes
in hopes that my mind would follow.

I’ve been thinking about
death again
my oldest friend
and it almost feels serene
to think about it’s certainty.
Sometimes, I still feel like her
all chaos and fear
heart as my mind
What if I’m not getting any better?
Trying to hold it together,
I hold on too tight
and constrict all
that keeps me upright.
Existing on borrowed time,
scribbled arrows over my veins
to try and find
a safe place on the inside
Because I can’t remember the last time
I felt safe on the outside.

I just want to shut my ******* phone off and run away
to the farthest location I could dream up and feasibly travel to
maybe Canada
I heard Toronto is nice
from former friends and lovers
although, I know my seasonal affect would never forgive me for that.
But what a serendipitous chance to feel nothing -
wrapped in the numb, stagnant northern air,
the only escape from a perpetual hanging on by a fragile thread.

Wandering through the streets
partially sober and grasping at the fabric tethered to my jacket
which has just begun fraying slightly,
snipped, but not severed quite yet
clasping its fingers around that of her fraternal twin,
lacing knuckles -
gestures reserved for lovers and family
and held together by the promises we never keep.

Spinning out like Fibonacci
an equidistant and calculated spiral
but then it finally breaks
and the tension is relieved.

Sometimes, you gotta just sit
on the bathroom floor for a while.
Because,
that’s where you got ready for
sleepovers with the popular girls
and made “potions”
out of various lotions and shampoos;
tattooed your finger when you were 15,
started to give up on the world,
and started to believe in it again.

Those bumpy tiles beneath you,
leaving red imprints on your upper thighs,
they saw your manic impulses
and sluggish lows,
they saw your meltdowns
before dance class,
and your moments of privatized shame,
after knocking over a vase
at your own house party.

The walls have changed over the years,
the floors have been
tile and ceramic and hardwood,
but a bathroom is a bathroom -
your own personal echo chamber,
a makeshift confessional,
wherever and whenever it fits
to serve that purpose.