I want vanilla pink linens
I wanna love so hard
I can't feel my toes
I don't want to decorate a dorm
I want to make a home
I can feel a band around my stomach tingling
Nervous excitement
The way you feel when you know you want to commit

There are the kinds of friendships
You make in kindergarten
With the girl in piggy tales 
And a missing front tooth
That last for a dozen years, 
Through your parents divorce 
and your first heartbreak 
your awkward stage 
And all your embarrassing moments 
And those kinds of friendships
Are wonderful 
And can be filled with so much good 
Until you grow up and grow apart
And fade into nothing but
Used-to-be's
And leftover promises.
But the best kinds of friendships
Don't last til graduation
Or maybe even until the fall. 
The best kinds of friendships
Are spontaneous 
And free. 
The best version of a person is 
The one you have 
For the fleeting moments
Of hot summers in little towns
Rope swings and canals 
Zip lines and lazy hours spent 
Cuddling in front of the tv. 
The best version of a person
Is the version you only get briefly
The version you meet and probably
Only know for a few weeks at most
The friends that you make in 
Ten seconds flat
With your best friends cousin 
Or that girl at summer camp. 
Those are the moments 
And the people worth living for.

my hands,
your hands,
same thing
my body
your body
different things
sorry I complicated things.
I wish I was different.
I know I'll stay the same;
I can't stay the same.
my body
your body
different things

Sometimes you feel like you're
Absolutely free falling
And there is nothing at the bottom
To catch you.
What a frightening thought;
Falling forever,
The world rushing past you,
Constantly anticipating the moment
When your
Fall fall fall
Turns into a
Land land land
Or a
Crash crash crash.
When there is no stable thing,
Nothing standing still,
Except you,
Effortlessly cascading into
The so unknown.
At first, it's a beautiful, peaceful thought.
Then you realize you have
Nothing in the world to hold on to.
Nothing
To keep you from that inevitable plummet
Into nothingness.
What a
Lonely lonely lonely
Way to live.

You are a Smashbook.
You are lists of hundreds of to do's,
You are your top ten favorite movies,
You are pieces of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
You are the trees you prune in your back yard
You are a garden you still have to plant
You are mornings
You are evenings
You are everything in between
You are light and love
And when the world comes and tried to shake these things from you
Remember every thought is tied to another,
Every piece of you is connected through roots
You cannot be broken
You are whole

Love was never a success
Tattered with devastating loss,
But rather a loss
Bathing in thousands of
Glittery little successes

You told me how my Polaroid works,
How the chemicals press themselves
Across the film
And how the light developes the colors.

You told me how to fix the AC
In my old beat up cougar,
And how to ***** on the broken door
That fell from my entertainment center.

You even told me I could fix myself,
As if you ever knew a thing about living
With a drum in your bones so loud
It awakes you in a cold sweat
Just when you thought
Monsters didn't exist anymore.

But you couldn't tell me
Why you can't mend your heartstrings,
Why your skin is always calloused
And scraped and rough
(Like a man's, you said,
Like a real man's).

You couldn't tell me the first step
To the easy fix of mending
Everything you've broken.
All you could tell me was
"I don't feel pain.
I don't feel pain."

You know 
When you see someone
And their eyes are Hazel
Or their hair is strawberry blonde
And you don't know what name 
To give it or what color to say it is?
Well that's how I feel about you

I want to write it all down.
I want to write it all down;
I want to get it out of me
Because I am so full of empty spaces,
You could run a river right through me
And there are lines,
Lines that trace all over my body
Some of them point to my limbs
To my extremities,
My fingertips
My hairline
Some of them scribble around
The holes that cover me,
And try to fill them in.
I'm covered in scribbles
I'm covered in holes
They cover my mouth
They fill the air.
I just wanted someone who would take them away,
Untangle my lines
Untangle my hair

Marry me.
I've longed for you so long,
My fingertips swell
As they reach for something
Untouchable.
Marry me.
I'm shedding dreams
Like the leaves
On my ginseng tree.
Marry me.
As the quiet months pass by,
My eyes droop;
I fall fast asleep.
Marry me.

I hope my skin was ebony
I hope the dust settles over you like white Sunday school chalk
I hope you keep me like religion
And hold me in your heart
Never acknowledging it on the surface
But Counting on me somewhere within

I'll never write like F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Maybe I'll never write at all,
Or ever again,
Because after the day I met him
The Stars parted like the Red Sea
And God let himself in,
Telling me it was His turn to take the pen.
So I laughed and handed it over
Knowing everything I had written was translucent and flimsy and meaningless

Things changed the night I cried on rolling hills,
And I thought of mauve and rosy skies,
Just like my favorite writer did,
Knowing the clouds would never the flower he brought me at my show,
And I cried and cried until the sun swelled up in the sky,
Reminding me I'm alive

It was six brilliant months and things all made sense.
I told him about how I loved pearls
And he told me he loved the ones his grandmother wore.
He told me about his favorite constellation,
And I didn't tell him I loved it even more

I wrote dumb poetry that rhymed and rhymed
Because everything made too much sense for it to not.
Every I matched with an e
Every heartbeat in iambic pentameter
And everything Made sense.

It wasn't until the ends finally loosened
And the strings broke
And everything fell utterly apart that I realized
I am not meant to be like F. Scott Fitzgerald, and skies are not meant to be rosy.

"Show me a hero, and I'll show you a tragedy."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

let me ask you something raw and real
Like what it's like underneath your fingertips
And between your bones,
Where you're cut so deep
You begin to find the parts inside
You didn't know belonged to you

Late afternoon
Train rides
I tell myself
If I could be anything right now,
I'd be fine

Like the May sky,
Pale blue and
Unwavering and
Unraveling me

The words seem to light up in my brain,
Highlighted neon signs
In dense yellows and electric greens,
A million ways to say the things that roam
From place to place inside the galaxies in me

The bright lights talk about the way you move,
The things I dream of you when I'm asleep,
How you call me by my middle name,
How you're always fiddling with a deck of cards because you need something to keep you from your nerves.
How I wait for days to pass until the time when my hands replace the cards,
And our ten digits make the difference
Fifty two cards used to,
And how soon, you'll hold my hand when you're nervous,
You'll hold my hand

All sixty-two of my spinal nerves
Are screaming, pleading
"Don't get hurt."

You hugged me today.
Which is fine I suppose-
There's nothing harmful in itself.
But I've heard it said
It's the principle of the thing that counts.
I am not afraid of a silly hug;
I'm not afraid of your touch.
I'm only afraid of this hug
Because a hug is a key.
Once you've hugged,
You've touched.
And touching is a dangerous thing.
Hugging is a dangerous key.
A key to open a door;
A touch that leads to more.  
A hug is vulnerable.
A hug is close.
Once you've been close,
Close becomes far,
And when close becomes far,
Close becomes closer
And far becomes further.
When you get too close
You begin to hurt.
And nobody likes to hurt.
So you see,
I'm afraid of this hug.

I'm so sorry I grew up here
I never knew a thing about danger
And the more I read about towns that weren't home grown and sugar sweet,
The more I wanted to cry
And I felt so scared
I'm sorry the static on the radio
Reminds you of worse days
Drifting through the sand
Oh, I wanted to save you
Oh, I wanted to save you
Still do

You are the hell
That ***** me in
And spits me out.
You are the pain in my chest,
The piercing scream,
The fistful of doubt.
We are not the elements
That chemically combine.
You are not the one
Who sends shivers
Down my spine.
I'll never love you.
And I never did.

I remember 
I remember the way you'd speak, 
Eyes reaching for the sky
As if there were something up there
Worth stretching for. 

I remember the way you'd touch, 
Holding me so tightly,
All the shards of my tattered soul 
Seemed like they'd never break again. 

I remember how you whispered
in my ear - 
Always in it's fullness and never lazy- 
I love you.

I remember footsteps asking why,
My crippled hands gasping for air,
Counting losses with each Breath,
As if there was anything
Worth reaching for.

I remember your touch so gentle
The way only Mean can be -
And all my pieces floated in air, 
A silently screaming silhouette 
Feigning defined. 

I remember whispering in your ear
As honestly and with as much fullness
As I could bear
I love you.
I wish you hadn't asked me why. 
That's the only thing 
I don't remember.

If it means nothing to you,
It means nothing to me.
And we can both carry on,
Like we just outlived a tragedy

If only you knew
About the things I put myself through.
If only you knew
About the nights I lie awake,
Wondering if things will be okay.
If only you knew
The way it feels when you push me away.

Six weeks ago if you'd asked me
What was the best day of my life,
I would've told you it was the night
We watched Groundhog Day

And it's funny
It's funny because my life is just the same
That every day I'd wake up
And nothing changed
It was six months of stagnancy;
Six months of every day angst
Never worrying about
Change
Commitment
Time

All we cared about was togetherness

If you asked me today what I think
Love means,
I'd tell you time
I'd tell you time

You were the poison in my wine
And I drank it just to feel drunk,
To feel like I was alive
Because the best way to feel alive
Is to know you're slowly dying

I used to cry at night,
Thinking of all the girls I know.
Id go to dance class,
And hug the tiny bunheads to my chest
Telling them their pirouettes were beautiful
Telling them they were worth something

I'd sit on the porch at my fathers house,
Watching my half sister make mud pies,
And feel protesting tears fall down my cheeks,
Knowing one day she'd look at her brown eyes
In the cracked bedroom mirror
And sigh,
Wishing they were ice blue like the girls from school.
I wanted to make her feel worth something
So I would play her Brown Eyed Girl,
And her chocolate irises would sparkle.

I'd think of all the girls who had confessed to me
In early morning, up all night, quiet, cracked and almost crying tones,
How their uncle, how their brother,
Their boyfriend
Their cousin
Their best friend
Their boss
Their dad
Had touched them and kissed them,
How they'd kept the secret buried in their chest,
Under a lump in their throat
And I wanted to tell them they were worth something.

I used to cry at night,
Thinking of all the girls I know.
I don't cry anymore,
Not because uncles and brothers have stopped touching,
Not because brown eyes became blue,
Not because the sin and the anger and the pain is gone,
But because I know girls -

I know pink ribbons.
I know pirouettes,
I know brown eyes
I know rom coms,
I know sleepovers,
I know red lipstick.
Because I know girls,

I know strength.
I know resilience.
I know bravery and anger and fight,
I know warmth and sunshine
I know love and nurture
I know waking up at seven a.m.,
Feeling capable
I know smiling my braced teeth at all the girls at the orthodontist who feel ugly for not being perfect,
I know holding hands in cinema parking lots,
I know friendship.
Because I know girls,
I know strength.

free verse
free as it could be
something inside me
is set free

I want to scream it, but I'll never be
Loud enough for him to understand that
I can't breathe if I'm not being told
I'm alive

Again, I am
Breathless
Worthless
Hopelessly falling
And I am
Breaking,
Taking,
Making no move.

There's too much air in your mouth
And you've got to fill it with something else,
So you fill it with the girl whose eyes are green and pale grey,
You fill it with her lips and her words
You breathe her in while she's still intoxicating
You let her fumes suffocate you,
You let your eyes wander from her
Alabaster collar bones
To her china doll skin.
She's unraveling you and you can feel yourself lifting up high, high, higher
You can feel yourself crashing
Down.

I'm too tired lately to describe my emotions in full. But I'll say this: just know as I'm falling asleep tonight, I'll be thinking of your blue eyes staring up at the sky. And every winter from here on forth, the first snowfall is dedicated to you. Every time I see those dazzling flakes cascade through the foggy breeze, I'll sing Earth Angel in my head and think of your eyelashes catching the frosted lace. I'll think of those same lashes brushing my cheek and I'll think of your quiet laugh telling me how you love butterfly kisses. I'll think over you and hundred times over before I lean in and kiss you right in the wintertime madness, because there's no way I'm spending another snowfall without you.

I'm not one of the lucky ones
who gets to fill the void
I just sit and let it sink deeper
Some days I don't even stand
cuz I can't stand you not holding my hand
all I've got is this pen
and these words I've written.
And you've got six hundred lives
you could live
and the only one I've got is just pretend
Because all I want
Is to lay asleep on your chest
And spend lazy afternoons scratching your back

When I ask you how you sleep at night,
I'm really hoping you sleep alright.
When I ask you how you live with yourself,
I'm really asking what it's like to do everything right.
And when I say
"I never want to see your face again",
I'm thinking
'When can I see you next?'
I can't get these thoughts of you
Out of my head.

It was not a pleasure.
It was sin
It was craving
It was 3 a.m. false hope
It was thinking I'd be okay
It was midnight stars
And blurred vision
I was alive the whole time
But it was not a pleasure.

I never told you about Holden
I never even finished The Catcher in the Rye
And actually all I wanted to tell you was
How I related to how bleak he was
And I think you got the point,
I think you got the point when I told you
I might die
I'm esther greenwood
I'm Holden
I'm every broken character
I'm a walking classic novel
Manic depression

And you told me if I died,
That would be the worst thing
But I can't help if I'm falling from the weight
Of falling figs from my hope tree

And I want hotel rooms
I want gasping for air
I want paisley couches
I want vanilla pink linens
I want to feel the soft burn
of you taking over
I want to feel like I'm always in overdrive
And I am I am I am
When I let you in

I wish I could 
Crawl inside her ear
And tunnel through to her brain
And remind her everyday
How much she is holding in her arms.

I wish I could
Swim through her veins 
Pulse inside her like blood
Rush through her heart
And make a place in there
For all the love you've given. 

I wish my words
Crawled through your ears
Filled your mind with thoughts
Of endless wonder
Pulsed through your veins
Touched your heart 
And made you believe.

I'm trying to find the words
          To make you see
You're everything
          I'll never be

She made rivers feel alive
When they washed her hair
She made boys feel definite
At her encounter
It was all she could do
To let the art rush out of her hairline
And grace everyone in sight
She was infinitely more than beautiful
She was everything

I want to touch the raspberry clouds
and feel cotton at my fingertips.
I reach for the sky,
and all I feel is airy nothing.

I want to breathe in
and smell cream soda
and cherry blossoms.
I step outside,
and I smell airy nothing.

"Its a long story."
A story that is only his and mine
Unspoken under covers,
Hiding under the lid
Of an empty bottles of pills.

"He didn't mean to",
A mantra I don't trust
But remind myself
When my eyes are closed.
He is mine, and I am his.
He tells me I am important to him,
That I mean something
So when he tells me,
Voice trembling over the phone,
"It didn't happen,"
I stay on the line.

It's fine with me
If all I'll ever be good at
Is keeping my head up

Everytime I hear that old song,
I picture the lyrics tattooed on your skin
And embedded all over
My every waking thought
Its like those calloused hands
Had more to say in the fleeting moments
That they held mine
Than I have ever heard in my life

He is a Fire,
Burning so warm,
That each struggling passerby
Cannot help but rush to his
Glowing embers in refuge

I am harrowing my fear
And feeding my courage,
So I might be a spark of His fire,
Living in His warmth,
Adding to the shelter that may save somebody.