Sometimes I cry so hard
A thunderstorm erupts in my rib cage
And my hands tremble like beach houses
In the path of a tsunami
But thinking of your eyes
Helps me escort oxygen to my lungs
And hold a paint brush instead
Of strangling the sheets of my bed
As if my tears will create a waterfall
Sweeping me away from you and
My pillowcase is wondering why I haven't screamed into it
In about a month or so
But I found reconcile in how your freckles
Resemble stars in the sky
And I've been trying to tell you
If you need the galaxy rearranged
I will do that
every single time the moon says hello,
I can promise you I can make the sun play hide and seek for as long as you'd like
If it means I can see the creases being created
By your smile again

her heart was bursting
at the seams
as her eyes fluttered
with untold dreams

l.r.

Dead to me,
but dead no more
I threw you ashes overboard.
Your memory no longer haunts me,
or plagues my mind.
Your memory is as blue
as the blackened shine.
I no longer wait
or ponder you.
I no longer stay
to love you.
Because you are Dead to Me,
but dead no more
I've thrown your ashes overboard
Dead to Me
for the world to see
with there own eyes
You are Dead to Me.

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.

Do you ever get that feeling
The feeling
When you're ten pages away from the end of a book you love?
You know the one-
That ache
That mingled fear and longing and nostalgia
A strange, electric urgency, a need to race to an ending you don't actually want to arrive at.
It is such a distinct, such a strangely painful feeling.
Do you ever feel it
When you look at your own eyes in the mirror?

I am sat in a cramped seat on a dimly lit plane
And a child wails somewhere beyond me,
Something between a giggle and a sob
And for the first time since I can remember
I don't know where I'm going.
And I want to drown myself in books.
Other people's stories.
I want to smother this feeling in them,
I want to live in the middle of someone else's life and never emerge again.
For the first time ever
I don't know where I'm going.

I can't explain this feeling.
It isn't the feeling I've had before, the tired sort of feeling you get when snow begins to trickle from the clouds on a fall day
And you just know in your bones that it will be
A hard, brutal winter.
Nor is it the feeling I've become familiar with
Of a spring which has somehow become lodged in my sternum and pressed to its breaking point,
That excruciating, itching tension and worry.
It isn't the feeling I've woken up to on countless mornings-
A creeping dread which feels like nothing so much as cold, clammy fingers running softly along every inch of your skin, except inside.

No, this feeling is one of total newness.
It is blind uncertainty.
It is a feeling of transition that I suppose I've suffered too much, previously, to have noticed or lingered in
And yet this time I find I've stuck fast in it
Like a shoe in a particularly deep patch of mud, when you tug and pull but the earth perversely refuses to relinquish your foot.
I've snagged, like a new coat on a briar bush
In this feeling of unsettled, unfinished, unsatisfied... expectancy.
Not of anything bad but certainly as well
Not of anything good.
I have, suddenly, upon being truly alone for the first time in a long time,
Discovered that I am moorless
And yet stalled.

And it isn't just that first feeling, no.
It is half of that feeling, that
"I don't want to finish the book" feeling.
But it is also equally the feeling you might get
If you were ten pages to go in your riveting novel,
Only to turn one and suddenly find that the rest was blank,
Halfway through a sentence
Halfway through a word
Nothing resolved, and nothing explained.
And maybe you'd keep turning, hoping for a mistake in the binding
But all ten are the same
Smooth. White. Blank. Waiting.
It is that feeling of grief and frustration and slight fear
A fondness for all the pages read before
But a craving for more that will not come
As if the ink would simply syphon away, even if you were, in your desperation
To write them yourself.

Yes, it's that feeling
Only about myself. About my life.
And I don't know when it will end
Or what it will end into.

I don't want it.
Tell me stories.
Tell me stories for the rest of my days
And never let my mind
Fall silent.