i notice these moments
more than anything else
you can call me "beautiful"
we can make love to my
favorite songs, but even
though i take that home
with me, it stays in the
bag i brought instead of
the pores in my body.
there's a silent movie in
my head that replays
e  v  e  r  y  s  i  n  g  l  e
gas station, back road
beaten up motel moment
that makes me certain that
you are a front cover to
my back one, & in between
the two of us, we'll create
a story that'll put the bible
in the drawer next to the
motel bed to shame.

i trace the cracks
in the pavement
with my foot
and bear the right
to miss you.
the *******
on my left hand
holding the cigarette
to my mouth
are turning pink
like my cheeks
when the winter
kisses them.
the smoke fills
my tiny lungs
until they can’t expand
any further
and when i hold it
for a few seconds,
i feel nostalgic
about that love seat
in your garage
and how your mom
was still alive and
things were so different.
i exhale
and watch the
cancerous contents
spill from my mouth
and remember the way
your lips look
so much better,
remember wishing
i could be your addiction,
remember how
you made death beautiful.

you’re not dead yet,
but you might as well be.
it hurts less and less
every time
i visit your grave;
the shell of
the person
you used to be.
i figured out
the different between
me and you;
i feel love,
but you shoot it
into your veins.
i hide my hands
inside my sleeves
and cringe
at the thought
of not being able
to call myself
“yours”
anymore.
i’ll take my slow,
last drag
and put out
what i thought
was going to be
a life time
of trying
to figure you out.

your mother used to
think of me as a street drug
but the bigger problem was
that she didn't treat you
like an addict and you
did not act like one.

your mother is gone now
and unable to see the real
street drugs you've been
hiding under your tongue
and in your pockets
but i'm sure she'd still
look at me as if i were
death itself.

your sharp jaw
your inordinate blush
the way you put yourself together.
if i could make dreams out of cold hands and dark tresses, you'd be my winter palace.
but when all of this is over,
when the sky lays dark and stormy,
i will run.
i will run home with no shoes on,
pound my fists into the pavement
till they're black, blue, and ******.
i will hold them open for you and say
"this is it. these are the most vulnerable parts of me,
and this is what i'm trying to give to you."
i will scream my own name
into your mouth
just to hear the echo in your chest.
it feels like you've tied my hands behind my back,
sucker punched me in the nose,
and i'm spitting out, "thank you,
thank you. this is all i want."

tomorrow morning,
i will brew up some coffee,
drink it black,
and lay in my bed with
waltz #2 on repeat
and i wont i won't
i won't
think
about it.

i've burned bigger bridges than you.

je me sens tellement
déconnecté de tout
ce qui m'entoure.
j'ai besoin que
tu rentres de
sorte que je
peux sentir
réel à nouveau.

last night, i was forcing the last couple drops
out of the bottle and into my sinful mouth
sitting on the floor of a kitchen that had
Christ hanging on the walls like he
******* died there or something.
in the morning, you arrived back in
your home state where you and your
morphine eyes will haunt my
ambien bedroom.

somehow
between facebook posts
and blankets tied around my neck
drunkenly running through the house
i keep finding myself
playing the heroine
to your hero.

ever since your mother told you not to talk to strangers,
you stopped looking at y o u r s e l f  in the mirror
but if anyone at all were to ask me about you
i'd have to tell them how you love the sun
or how you'd whisper in the morning
allthough you are a bomb to me
you told me once that you swear
you had died with me in an attic fire
in a past life that hurt even more than this
that's when i realized i could scream my name
into your mouth, and hear the echo
coming from your chest
that was the closest i could ever get
to your heart
i'd sleep next to you as
you cuddle with your dreams
while nightmares are fended off
by the better parts of you
the ones that put a pin-sized hole
in your heart every time i
cried for you, and you couldn't
return the favor.
every single morning, you'd wake
and the nightmare would return
it turns out that's what was
holding my hand the whole time
i memorized the words in your eyes
it hurt and i
       suffered and i
                  bled and i  
       cried
but at least i did it
now they rush through my veins
out of my fingers, through this pen
i can't let go of it now

i forgot to say
you're not allowed to touch me
without dirt under your fingernails

To my dear friends who have followed and supported me on this website,
after about a year or two of not being able to write more than a poem every few months at most, I decided enough is enough and I need to get back into the swing of things.
Which I will be doing on a new account! Clean slate and all.
I wanted to let all of you know that you have all been an important part of me growing into myself as a writer and a person, I could not have survived without coming on here every day and writing about anything I was going through and knowing I had an infinite supply of support.
If you still would like to keep up with me, I'll be leaving a comment on this post from the new account so you can find it.
And even if you don't, I still want to say thank you, so much, for being a part of such a special part of my existence.

lately, i've been jealous
of the attention handed out
by people who shouldn't
matter to me

he didn't have me
sweating on his
bedroom floor
he didn't have me
crying with my head
in the toilet
he didn't have me
locked outside
my own rib cage
he didn't have me
like you did he didn't
have me like you did
he didn't have me

something snapped in me earlier this month
i think it was the bough that held most of what was rotten inside of me
but it could've just been the breath i was holding ever since the day i declared that your absence was never permanent, but i realized that this time it is
but this is not a poem about hoping that what goes up must come down, and what leaves you has to come back around
it's about how the clouds are looking more like laughing children
and i hear the birds in the morning without mourning you at the sight of an empty chair
i have found truth in a kind of beauty that has nothing to do with you

two weeks ago, all i thought about was what kind of person you have become and if they are anything like the person i fell in love with, but

if i've learned anything about love from you
it's that sometimes it means screaming until your voice shatters and other times it's found in silence
or growing out of old ways and apologizing despite only having fallen so hard, you left a crack in the cement

i've learned that the only reason anyone could ever replace me is because i left a hole big enough in their chest to need replacing
and by the end of it all, i got to laugh and cry and *** and be the truest, most human version of myself in the presence of someone else
i have a whole lifetime to do it all over again

i loved the things that you would do when you were you
that is enough for me

isolation called you
and passed a tunnel into
a bright world where
you can ignore the
wonders of existence.
my heart can be a
little house for you
to stay, but
everybody's scared
of this place.

i  base  my  worth
off of how my friends
treat  me,  how  many
beers i can drink before
the taste makes me sick,
and how many times i can
dial your old phone number
and listen to a stranger
remind me of how
disconnected
you are.

1AM, i was
gently shoved
out of a dream
in which i was
thrown into some
type of parallel
where

you
      and
              i

had never spoke
more than a mere
"excuse me"
walking into school
one morning
holding a glass door
open

i have spent
the last 5 hours
trying to get
this scene out of
my head.

even in a universe
where you had
never squeezed my
hand twice, like a
pulse, or sat on
your porch with
your cigarettes we
shared and two
glasses of orange,
i left my lipstick
on everything
you'd have thought
i would be more
permanent --

even then
i spent the rest
of my dream
thinking
about how
7:45AM
looks so
good on
you.

the golden month of summer
we're recovered from the semester
we spent making fun of each other
i know this because of the way
you are holding my hand
in this moment, i am begging
for someone to ask what love is
so i can tell them something like
"you know when you hold onto
something for too long and your
palms get a little sweaty and so
you let go of whatever it is?
i feel like that right now, but
it's more like his hand is
sweaty but i'm grabbing tighter
like a plead from a door frame
begging for the slamming to stop
yeah, my palm is sweaty but
i cannot let go.

2 years later, here i am
my hands are clenching themselves
into fists, my palms are sweating
but i've developed this habit of
not letting go of anything
and i miss you.

i fell in love with you sober.
you were drunk.
i saw you at your worst;
open and raw
and flayed to the bone,
and i loved you.
you were honest--
too honest
and rude at times,
but i appreciated that.
you knew how to
have a good time.

in a perfect world,
we'd spend mornings in bed,
tracing each others limbs
with just the very tips of
our fingers.
we'd eat tons of food together
and steal cigarettes
from the neighbor,
like we used to.
i'd laugh at you
and smile about your face
again.

you’re a lot like the second shot of whiskey,
warm, burning, has anyone told you that your hands
they are are firecrackers, taking off into the night?
and i’m a lot like coming down from the high
and the thought that you and i somehow
ended up in the same universe was the only thing
helping me fall asleep peacefully in my own sheets

but the moon has said goodbye to me,
and the sun comes up to welcome you another day
and i am burning my tongue on my coffee,
desperately hoping you'll text me

once, i liked a guy
who was good with his words,
a poet, if you will.
it didn't take long
to realize that was all
he was good with,
and relationships
were at the bottom
of that list.
now i wonder
if those two traits
go hand in hand.

it's not hard
only to want love
to write about.

i am sitting on my back porch with you
more satisfied from your presence than
the nicotine between our fingers, and i'm
holding back laughter to hear yours first
because it's cold out and the sound of it
puts the warmth back into the air and
i can breathe again.

until your leg brushes against mine
then pulls back faster than i could notice
it was even there in the first place

the space between our bodies is a purgatory

i look at you
the same way
you look at the
7:30pm sky
when it's lit up
in bright pinks
oranges, yellows,
instead of blue --
full of wonder
and melancholy

when i think about you
i think about being so close
that our heartbeats are touching

i think about laying in your
dark blue bed sheets
cologned in your honey breath
wanting you to rip me open
and fall in love with my organs

i remember all i want for christmas
is for you to let me be
in the same room as you
and how when you cracked your neck
it sounded like a question

i think of how you left before your
scent could soak into my pillowcases
and i think about hating you for that

then i think about you, starved skinny
and her fishnets getting caught on
everything and you loving it

and i think of the violin in the next room
that sounded like "**** me **** me **** me"
and telling you that being held
does not make you a prisoner

and i think about the ambien hearted girl
and you shaking her to wake her up
while i'm jealous of the dying/dead

still am

i know i've said that it hurts most at night,
and screaming into your pillow at 2am
is the romantic, glorified equivalent
of constantly feeling
cheated
emotionally bruised
and too far away from him,

but sometimes,
it’s 10am on a monday morning
and you’re leaning on the kitchen sink
waiting for the toast to pop up
and the smell of dusty sunlight and
chamomile tea makes you
miss. him. so. much.
that you don’t know what to do
with your hands.

when you were 6,
you made homes for faeries under trees.
now you just hope they choose to live in your lungs,
help you appreciate the magic of breathing.
i am your collapsable lover
and you've got a body like a wreck
i can't stop looking at.

i know a boy who’s afraid of the dark
and that’s why he won’t ever kiss me.
i took nothing but hours, left nothing but bruises.
you responded to my tears calmly,
with only a shrug.
you put your hoodie on & went out for a cigarette.
i left before you came back.

*i am a glass girl with diamond wrists,
this is how i love.

i remember the way love used to taste
it crept up my sternum, crawled up the back of my throat, strangled my tongue, and leaped out of my mouth with a trembling, shaking "i don't know how to feel like this anywhere else so please let me stay"
although there was an eviction notice stuck in between the door and the frame but i didn't open the door, to leave, to see it
and i used to look at people who could find something good and run from it and wonder how they could possibly do that when i ran to every doorstep, pleading for someone to let me in and planting my feet firmly into their ground as soon as they did
there are pieces of myself in every corner of these rooms, every crack in these walls, clumped in bathroom sink drains and i understand now
the more love you give that is unrequited, the less you have to give out again

and i'm only a few drunken, empty i-love-you's away from running dry

you've always been the type
to pull stitches rather than
throw punches
i've always cried
when you whispered but
stayed curiously sober
when you'd scream.
it was the end of the world,
we sinned so severely
your halo fell around your neck
became a noose, you became my
muse but the only poetry you
wanted to know was what
i could make in the dark with you
when i could forget myself.
without you, the weight of me
is unbearable
i only ever dream of you
in different shades of blue
and remember you as
the feeling of drowning
you left too soon
the loss of you grew in it's place
pale and inevitable
i realized i love that more.

i have been living off of
black coffee and celery
for the past 4 days and
i want to blame it all on
the fact that i'm young
and stupid and i will do
almost anything to like
myself again.

i can grow out of this,
right?

tonight was a godsend

he plays the cello in parks after hours while i'm smoking cigarettes and trying to think of things to write down later
he sleeps in the back of his truck with a blue blanket when he doesn't want to wake up in his bedroom alone
he climbs on everything and doesn't sit still and ***** girls that i can only imagine wish that he would kiss them too
he went to school for massage therapy and he looks like chris from skins and he was manic tonight and said i made him happy and he's sorry that he used me
i told him to do it again

concealing the smiles
to seem less eager to please
in a smoke filled garage, you're holding
a can of beer that seems to be
sweating even less than i am
maybe it's nervous to meet your
lips, too

this is a night that leaves you
weak in your knees and begging
for just one more hand to brush
against your shoulder as it's
trying to route around you
to find the perfect spot on
the pool table, and that's
the only form of in-the-way
you're going to be tonight

they like you
don't worry

don't talk to me about addiction
when you can still brush your teeth sober
act like you're too troubled to be a friend to me
when you're getting high, you just dont care

when you call, i get that feeling
like i just finished sobbing
choked up and dried out and exhausted
i get drunk and want to talk to you anyways

this is not about me being angry
this is not about how i used to see us
naked at the west end of humanity
the last two living souls, me and you,
naked in the wreckage of the world,
the opposite adam and eve

i should've understood sooner
that there's nothing romantic
about being the villian, no matter
how very much in love you are

this is about me, asking you to let me tell you
about the times i almost jumped off mountains
and then let me tell you why i didn't

there's more to being human
than embracing the mistakes you make
building a home out of apologies and
"i've been ****** up"s and
"you don't deserve this" -
when they tell you that it's okay
because you're only human,
they're reminding you to embrace
not only the bad, but the good too

i held you
very carefully,
got scared,
and put you back
exactly
how i found you,
like a gun.

on nights when you remember
can you feel my anger
through all of these years
and all of the miles?

everything that you touch
is luckier than i am

i don't want a boyfriend
or a girlfriend
i want someone to care
i don't want the responsibility
of taking care of someone else
when i can barely handle myself

i want someone to help me
function like a normal human being
and run me a warm bath
when i can't get out of my bed
in fear that the heaviness of
the dull, numbing sadness
trapped in my bones
will cause my body to shatter
and turn to dust
upon impact with the floor.
i want somebody who won't
get angry with me when i
don't feel like talking-

someone who knows that
doesn't mean anything.

this morning, i awoke with a million different things swimming through my brain's waves and wiring that all could be summarized in only four words, picked at, scraped down, and peeled off completely raw:
my heart is hurting.

if the people at that party could physically see it in action, it would be on it's hands and knees, crawling to the nearest and darkest corner to hide in. no one seems to think you deserve me and no one has any patience and no one is waking up this morning, clutching their knees to their chest at the thought of the curve of his smile, making me want to meet god just so i could thank him for it.  

and i think it's almost insane, the way this world works. how i stayed on the porch with him until the sun came up even after he said he'd only stay for a little while. how we talked so loudly of loneliness but hadn't even slightly exhaled the word itself. how he's a figment of my past but he made my world feel new again. how all of the people that want me around are pushing me away because of the way he leaves me and showing their teeth because of the way i want him despite that- there is no kindness here- when the reason it hurts is because he is the most warm, tender person and understands the same thing about me.

it's a dog-eat-dog world and i am a 16 year old human, eating a burrito over the kitchen sink in my underwear at 5 o'clock, monday morning.

i woke up this morning
wishing i hadn't
and the sky wept for me
then revealed one of the
most vibrant rainbows
i've ever seen.
i couldn't look at it
because every color
is someone i used to love
and god, red is painful

i am made of sin,
you're the only innocent
god i believe in.

i've found myself awake to see the sun rise for 3 days in a row.
i want to believe it’s allowed me to remember there is still
pureness around me but it only exhausts me.
purity is something i never fall asleep alongside.
i keep eating strawberries before 7AM.
there is an empty carton of eggs on the counter
that i didn’t cook for myself.
someone told me i look very beautiful when i wake up
but i think that depends on the amount of heavy dreaming i fell into.
when the sun rises tomorrow morning and i catch it, as i most likely will,
i have a message for it. i want to tell the sunrise that first impressions are everything.
if it mattered in the first moment, it matters now.
my sheets are twisted in the way you could never mess them up.
you can tell me the same thing over and over but it’ll still sound new.
everything still tastes like you. you are still the pretty boy.
you are still the sunset i nap right through every evening.