Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
Dec 2016 · 507
Salvation
Four o'clock in the morning on a sunday, and you'd think that I was looking for something to believe in, in the way that my hands found sanctuary on the steering wheel.

I wrote poetry about salvation in the condensation on my windows, thinking that maybe if I was able to write it all down well, I'd feel brand new at dawn.

I think that it would be easier to just get up and keep going, but the farthest that I get is the nearest mountain, where I can see a bit more than I'm used to. It's like dangling over eternity. Autumn leaves falling, intermingled with the regret of past lives that I can still taste in the air.

Occasionally, I feel as though I'm begging to something that I don't believe in, to show itself in the serenity of nature, or maybe I'm just begging myself for some clarity.

I scraped my knuckles on the stone, losing grip climbing up the side, and it always strikes me as odd when I realize that I still bleed like everything else.

It's five o'clock in the morning on a sunday, and my fingers are tapping out some unknown beat on the faded jeans across my knees, and it's the closest that I'll ever be to god.
Jan 2015 · 386
Untitled
The underneath of my nails are filthy
From digging graves for myself.
Dec 2014 · 662
summer-heat
I used to think about ******* boys in open pastures
Clothes tangled on our bodies
Thin ******* down to the mid of quivering thighs and feverish hands pushing down against the yielding earth.

I used to think that maybe that was what being alive was
Intermingling *** and adventure in the sun
Watering the earth with the drippings of some wild, summer-heat driven clashing of sticky skin
I remember wondering what flowers grow from sweat and *****.

Years later, I made love to a sun kissed boy on the banks of a river
We were wild, passionate, fearless.
Never had I tasted anything so sweet as the sweat dripping onto our lips
I forgot about ******* boys in pastures
I began making love to a boy on the water
Then I realized that sweat and ***** grow passionate wildflowers.
Dec 2014 · 498
Morning.
Lips slick in the morning sun
arms and elbows
knees and thighs intermingled under thin linen sheets
My heart is a caught butterfly in a jar

You touched places inside of me that I can’t feel anymore.
Dec 2014 · 551
Foreign
In the empty morning silence
your eyes reflect happiness upon a glaze of sleep deprivation.
Drowsy hands tapping beats upon worn jeans and the condensation fogged windows.
Why can’t I let go of that smile
the elbow creases and the fleshier bits of the forearm attached
to the human that I feel so desperately attached to
yet
unattached from.
Calm music battling shaking hands
and nerves like tightened knots.

My hands never felt so foreign as they do when I think that your eyes are on me.
Dec 2014 · 517
Distinctly Human
I’ve been spoiled.

Pleasures of the flesh dancing circles in my dreams, laying rose petals, supple and decadent in their beauty across memories of the feel of your skin. Smooth and distinctly human.

With hands like wandering explorers, curious and cautious as fingers danced across foreign flesh.
Dec 2014 · 510
Lost
I feel like I’m on fire.
Limbs shaking, fingers slick with guilt and anticipation.
I can’t continue to put myself through this, but I also understand that I can’t just leave you behind to your own devices.
It’s been seven years since I became your savior.
Seven years since I became your crutch.
Thirteen years old, losing hold on my innocence as you held on to me like I was your life source.
The only solid thing holding you down to the ground.

In some ways, I was happy to help you.
Days turned in to years, I felt my first taste of heart break, my first real taste of fear.
The strange exhilarating rush of childish intimacy wrapped in the hands of a meddling boy, and you stuck beside me, as mothers should.
I thank you for that.

I’ve been ****** dry.
Seven years of listening to you pull yourself apart.
Seven years of me growing deeper into being a self sufficient woman; sharing my secrets and my advice in hopes of pulling you closer.
In hopes of pulling you back to the surface.

Three years ago, you picked up the bottle.
Three years ago, you gave up on being a mother because you said that you didn’t know how to be.
Three years ago, you gave me the ohkay go to become an independent person.
Three years ago, you strapped chains to my core and began living vicariously through me and my stories, and I obliged.

I tried to save you.
I begged you to stop drinking.
I pleaded to you.
Please come back. Please be my mother again. Please help me, because I’m lost, and I don’t know how to come back.
But you didn’t know how to come back either, and I held on to your hands as you cried and told me that you were just as lost.
Dec 2014 · 518
Unraveled
Wake up
There are no birds to be heard
There’s a stillness held captive, lining all four walls
Eyes open, but are still glazed over
Uncertainty settles in
Arms wrapped tightly around a shaking core
Mind spinning
The bitter taste of distrust creeping to the back of an empty throat
There is no common ground
A battle field of paranoia and nervousness
Tugging and unraveling the tightly sewn threads of a composed demeanor
Dec 2014 · 419
Mud and Love and Dirt
My girl doesn’t have perfect legs; they are scarred from blindly leaping into rivers and climbing up trees. Bare feet. Cut hands. The Earth receives her well but the rocks and stones push back against the soft flesh of her calves.

My girl has traces of pain hidden on herself where she tried to let it out, arms crossed over an aching chest, she’s a master of hide and seek.

My girl is at constant battle with herself, asleep on the couch, I can hear her stomach growling. She’s on a diet of fruits and honey, she doesn’t see herself melting away.

My girl has dreams where she smiles in her sleep, where she bites her lip and smirks at four o’clock in the morning, when sleep finally overtakes her small form. Underneath the covers; hiding away from a world that she no longer wishes to be a part of.

My girl never cries, even when I can tell that she’s breaking on the inside. Quietly, she’ll sit. Quietly, she’ll write in her journals, small delicate sweeps of the pen across blank unlined paper. She looks like a small author, or a whisperer of dark secrets, crouched over her journal.

My girl is a mystery wrapped up in a beautifully torn and bruised shell. She leaves sickly sweet reminders of herself wherever she goes. Her bare feet prints show; mud and dirt and love on my heart.
Dec 2014 · 387
Urgency
There is an unsettling pain
that has taken root deep within the fibers of my being.
A nervous ache that comes and goes
just as you do.

The fear of taking my next step forward has rendered me defenseless to my own devices and I find myself unable to sleep in fear
that some self created form of you will visit me as I try to unconsciously push you out.

Sometimes I feel as though there is no end to this constant whirlwind of barbed wire feelings that encapsulate themselves inside of my heart and mind.

I still long for the smooth touch of the fingers that showed me what it meant to feel whole again.
I do not want this to become a vice.
An impasse between heart and mind
Wherein I leave behind the very essence of myself that made it possible to survive in a world where I can’t feel you.

The passage of time only signifies and solidifies the fact that I should break these urgent fingers while I can still run and hide
Dec 2014 · 343
Expell
I can still taste your name when I listen to our favorite songs.
Except instead of basil and summer time sweat
It tastes like bile and blood from biting my ******* sorry attempt to keep my insides, inside.

I don’t know how this sweeping ache returned.
Maybe it’s because everything around me is some part of you.
We grew gardens out of one another and I’m still watering the flowers that are growing from my fingertips and every other part of me where your lips planted seeds.

My body is now overgrown with memories that seem like weeds
My arms are heavy from trying to hold everything up.


I used to think that maybe if I could expel my insides, I could get rid of this burning sensation that has taken up home inside of myself.
Like a frog who’s eaten a wasp, I’d cleanse myself and push the bad out.
Then again, I don’t know if I want you out.

I guess it’s comforting to know that something inside of myself has grown so out of control, that not even I can get a grip on it.

— The End —