lately i've needed the color blue
the thought of crawling into bed
the songs about denver and seattle and the late-night flights across the continent, my love
i need a haven for my dreams, and a place to rest my head

it's the emptiness
it's the hatred that builds up in the creases of your
smile, of the laughter you hide your disgust with

it's the appointments you tear from your organizer
the holes in your stomach
the sunburn on your shoulders; the redness of your nose

it's your incurable phobias
your cut-up legs
your bleeding nose
your teary eyes
your itchy back
your raw skin

swollen lips
bare nails
unkept hair
ugly voice
tiredness

why the ****'d you think spring would fix you?

23:37
all streetlights become moons
on your way back home

i see myself in you
in everything you are and anything you hate

in the nervousness of your pleas
that brings stiffness to your neck - and mine
- and hides tremors from your voice

i have more faith in you
than you know;
more trust, in the soft longing of your eyes
than any of the pains you've commited
and your broken smile, teeth baring hate
for every single time you couldn't say no

i stack every ****** under one flag.

I. there is a sort of ephemeral longing
you can only find in the heartbreaks of grown-up girls
(old tracks, cleaned room, messy hair, simplicity)

thinking back on the glowing days of adolescence
when bad flicks brought you places

IV. back then, the anticipation of being older was
almost tangible enough to cut
in halves, fourths and one-tenths

now the mere thought turns you off;
lemon cakes taste as bitter as the sugar
poured in your third afternoon coffee

V-III. your love of chocolate was left at the beach
along with pink heart-shaped sunglasses

(i rented that semicentennial-old russian novel
to convince myself that dreams aren't real
and until the skin breaks, your past stays intact
at least that's what H.H. taught me)

VI. looking back, your childhood was not as bad
as you make it out to be, truth be told
fascinated by your infatuation with the
place where you always belonged;

II. today the world is cold, punctuated
by the sore troubles of reality
that friends, majors and late-night talks
both compose and mend

and heaven knows how much you have to say.

I wish I knew love as well as you know me, in your simple way of making my cheeks turn
red like the autumn blush staining the leaves of my homeland trees

i give up
on being kind, i simply don't deserve it

you know me better than i know myself
so which is it?
law or chaos? or freedom?

i found being a lunatic does not grant
you peace of mind; on the contrary

yearning for wind in your hair
makes it hurt more when you
end up sheltered again
but in all truth, freedom true too
sounds exhausting

especially

when you don't deserve to live
the girl who cried wolf
with her smiles and band-aids
only kids with innocence ever worry
about me anymore

others keep their eyes shut because
they're sick of watching me fall

i am flawed
but alex this is all we are; our mothers' melatonin

the reflection of the sun in your teeth leads me to believe our time is up
& the softness of my thighs against your hand stops the world from spinning blue

what if i keep my nails long to curve them into my skin
and what if i strangle myself at night?

does it matter if i dream that i'm a smoker
if it made my mother sad
if i bruise my legs, if i pinch and tear myself apart

i pick scabs to watch the skin grow back
right before my eyes

The villains like you, the souls that crave to take the world for themselves
more often than not are more pure and honest than the **** living off
the scrapes of their god's good green earth

because we the people hold many kinds of strange, veiled monsters in the bright sun that
shatters our land; you say you're bursting with demons but my world is even fuller.

In the light of your eyes i can see nothing more than a boy afraid and placid in his heart,
and thunderous, driven by a hatred so grand, so glorious that not even
the roads of hell could dare ensnare in its engulfing flames.

You are not as evil as they say, BECAUSE THEY LIED to you and me,
they slandered the tale of your people, of their malicious minds (and
I just can't bear the thought of you laying alone anymore,

the tears sting and the shine cuts unusually deep but not all the way through)
and they keep lying when we ask why the jade knight was cast away,
why the peace truly reigns, and why we must obey to the unfit beasts that threaten our dying solace.

there are so many songs i need to dedicate to you
tears and cuts on my thighs bearing your name,
photographs and yellowed paper, happiness;
crying lyrics and old rock songs you would hate (but i love
even that in you, even the execration held dear in the creek
of your summer heart)

i want the world to be yours anytime you ask
because i try to stay strong for you;
whatever you feel is the most righteous thing in my mind

the words you spew sting like poison
you squandered me

you're the kind of man who grew up
listening to nothing more than the beat
of your own heart
and the wild cries of your protégés,
burning
because while the incense lasts, the smell
of your summer skin fills each and all
with thirst
for the battlefield where you've made
your mark
and shed your blood

by the california suns and
the twelve thousand likes on your instagram
i raise my glass to you

let's leave the world behind, breaks all laws
make the angels cry
scream at the top of our lungs

tonight life is light but my eyelids got droopy fast
i love you though, i'll try to hang on to memories of you
while i sleep through the next hours

right into my next fit of anxiety
coddled between my sunglasses & your self-portraits

i'm your work-in-progress, move-me-gently sort of go-to person
and i burn my tongue with hardly-bitter sweet coffee, as a reminder
that things last, and pride will scar your bones

it took me years to realize
it's always harder at night
and that i would **** for the moon

I don't feel like a happy person.

I don't feel like a happy person.

I feel like years of yearning would feel, grasping at dreams in the daylight.

I feel like guitars strumming, ghostlike.

I feel like wasted space and blurred lines, the weight of a song deftly moving in my head.

I never want to allow anything to hurt me again, I could promise. I want so much to walk the large, well-lit autumn-rimmed clear haven streets and not look back, always with destination. I am an artist not creating, I stagnate. I run.

The crying thunder breaks my fears into bugs and mud, it seeps through and out the pores and cracks of my skin. Somehow when the world decides to off you, a good night of sleep doesn't quite feel like the solution. How can I sleep with death swift under my eyes?

Confirm the beauty in my lack of rendition, and the galaxies deep in the creek of my dying summer heart.

Why are the night and day so different?; and do they have to be?

There's nothing tangible anymore in the seatbeltless buses of the south province (that's where I'm stuck). I crave one thing, but I know it's only a gap, a void I'm trying to fill. I can't stay here anymore is the only refrain that made sense to me when I sobbed it out loud.

So good riddance to my selfish fears and my hypocrisy. Hello new world, I am yours and you are mine.

Life is like this greyish purple sky, - or is it smoke? - a strange and foreign concept, Life here in the most vivid and true sense of the word. The everlast of screen-bright polaroid collections and radio station lovesongs play up the impossibilities of any kind of breathe and let go, of give yourself kindly, irremediably and unbridled.

But no white plastic frame can tame a nose's redness, from the sun's kiss or a frosty, tender January bite. Love-in-the-making is an art, so I'll try not to lose it.

It's funny how you can live your whole life in the same place and never push forward. You'd think at some point the stillness would start to choke you but really, it's the people. It's you.

You are the problem, you outgrow your family and your friends and your love of watching the sun set rather than rise. You crave new beginnings, one-way train tickets and silence – only silence. Anything louder than the pounding of your heartbeat aggravates the creeping headache that your trusty ******* ibuprofen can't rid you of.

Somewhere along the line, who you are isn't enough.
-
Nursing new habits isn't always a good thing.

Granted, some provide you with a sense of self, a reason to wake up every day for a little while, or at least until the snow melts into the early spring grass. Some habits warm you up like a great big mug of coffee, like your favourite song, like brushing hands with strangers.

Some habits hold you down at 5am when you're still crying. At times it feels so **** good to finally have someone agreeing with you that you don't even mind what it is they're agreeing with. You're two souls in your head, shaking hands on the fact that no one would miss you if you were dead, done, disappeared.

But you don't make plans; don't need 'em. You don't grab a knife or a bottle of pretty white pills, and you don't open your second-story window to crush your skull on the stone-hard January ground. Your hour-long showers aren't ****** razor-blade cover ups. Your long sleeves don't hide scars. On some days, your mother remarks that you look very pale however, and in that moment your ******-up baggy eyes do hide some secret slice of you that you'd rather not share with "the living". The unconditional love makes you feel guilty for all the crying fits, the self-addressed suicide notes and the black black thoughts.

make-believe kalifornia, we'll be riding your roads
all sunglasses and blue sky, his laughter echoing in my ears
to the beat of the drum

open up my eyes to fields of sun, leave everything behind
we breathe and pray and love

she walks the street in the crying, baby breath morning
where the shoreline is the sky,
the greyness and the damp east coast afternoons
what's left in her heart anyway?
her hair parts
she strides into the full and the lighted
the open bars and the gentlemen
soft evening glow that catches the photograph

for all the memories and the bitterness,
is it true people fall in love?

i want to burn like mad
or beg, if that helps any

i miss having dreams where somebody takes my hand
and makes me believe in love again
lately the only dreams i've had were plagued with
dead romances
or worse, none at all

i feel throbbing in me
like i could give up on my heart finally and let it go
and what fun would that be?

it's a long way from the cradle to the unmade bed

realizing you have to fight for your own happiness
cause nobody's got it easy

I have to hold on to every last bit of
you; you've been slipping away too long
now, your breath's leaving the small of
my neck now,
and there's no certainty in my lust for
your appeal, I can't tell if your smile is
enough for me to go on. I'll shower in
the memories of what we had when the
beach skies were green and the cities,
beautiful.

though i sometimes forget you

in the dead of night
your reflection beats on me

and each and all thoughts
that fill my heart with dread

are memories carved in me
with you

you've been on my mind
with every scratch of lead on paper and ink and ink
cut print moving on
you stay fresh in my brain like a stamp on a postcard
guts and guts and more

yet you learned to fade like they all do
you learned i can only need you for so long and that thought is just desolating
i don't crave your sympathy half as much as i'd like to think

but the nights are getting really ******* cold
and i'm empty the more i push; it's still what i wanted
and what i'm working towards
and what i'm not ever giving up on
no pills will be too tempting to me despite how much i hate myself

there's a fire cracking in my bones
and your smile's not growing

but i'm worthless
and i often wonder if you know the feeling

dead trees like cotton against the clouds

won't* be one of the god-abandonned-me's
in the months i've known your
gentle balance, my jade daydreams -
eyes shut
lulled by a deep sense of belonging
only you would fathom
you!
frail architect of the inner workings of an
entire GENERATION
who took a bullet to further hide
from the depths
and the eyes that never blinked or looked away
you defied what pains the soul
recklessly
You cleared the way, bracing for an
impact too shattering for words and yet
here we are
[from the edge to the center you crafted
a place for yourself deep through
the waterworks and broken down
inside the steam pipes you found yourself
a home]

you
divide time in half-
                                    hours
because that's all
                         you can
                                   afford