the stars in your eyes shine brighter than the comets falling from your open wrists

I have been learning how to die,
have prepared myself at every
intersection or doctor's office,
have been whispering
Good Bye
like last words,
every time.

I have been learning how to be a corpse,
have been rotting from the
inside out,
have been peeling away the decaying flesh
beside my fingernails,
on the inside of my lip,
around the wounds that I know will never get the chance to heal now.

I have been learning how to be a skeleton,
have been leaving empty spaces
between ribs
and
vertebrae,
have been training myself to lie still
in small, dark places.

I have been learning how to be a ghost,
have haunted my own
home,
have found solace
in inhabiting this body
that I claim to belong in,
I have been learning how to regret.

I hurt my hands on purpose, punish myself for the things I can't control like this hole in my brain you're too busy to crawl through
I tell myself that im healing, that three days sober is a start to something better, that maybe I'll wake up for the rest of this lifetime without bruises or "how did I get here" maybe something will stay long enough to understand that I do the things I do because he's doing the things he does an hour away from where the sun stopped rising 12 years ago where the waterfall stood still and I'm left here with all this stillness inside of me, like I feel too much so I have to punish myself with numb and you have to punish yourself with maybe I could have stopped her from breaking her own wrists
maybe nobody gives a **** about maybe
nobody cracks a smile with hope strung through their teeth like Christmas lights or tinsel or something
I tell myself that my dad doesn't have to drink to sparkle anymore and neither do I
neither do I but I do and I end up with are you sincere tattooed on my hand with no idea as to when it happened or when I would ever think that it would be a good idea to look down at all of this breaking and bruise and be reminded of you but I did and I do
so no,
maybe nothing sparkles anymore

I hope you don't understand me,
hope I remain something mysterious to you,
hope you romanticize me into something complex rather than a body and a series of chemical reactions,
I hope I can fool you into believing that I mean more than what I say,
hope you write about me and analyze it to find some sort of answer,
hope you look for symbolism in the way I do my makeup,
hope you think me into a work of art and spill it from your veins,
I hope I burn on the way back out,
hope you have scars on your fingers from trying to dissect me,
hope I make you nervous,
hope you think about how to phrase things before you say them around me,
hope you ask every question strategically,
hope you think I know exactly what you're up to,
I hope you play word games with me to see how my mind works,
hope you still can't grasp it,
hope I'm always close enough to touch but not to get a firm grip on,
hope you dig yourself into a hole walking in circles to get a better view of me,
hope you never say my name for fear of manifesting the sound incorrectly,
hope you have no ******* clue what any of this means,
I hope you never understand me

You like it, don't you? You hate yourself and you love that about you, you love your brooding pain, the way you can't say your own name without choking. You love to see how close to the bottom you can get before you start gasping for air, you want to swallow salt water, let it fill your lungs like tar, you want them to miss you, want them to feel guilty, want him to love your pain as much as you do, want him to appreciate how well you can destroy things, want his vision to be distorted by the scars on your wrists, want him to kiss them, want him to feed your pain. You want troubled girl meets nice boy, want him to try to save her, want her to die anyways, want him to be troubled boy to meet nice girl, want her to try to save him, want him to die anyways, want to start a cycle, want the world to resonate with the aching hollowness of your last words, want everyone to know how much you're hurting, how strong you are for still being here, for still fighting, but you're not fighting, are you? You gave up a long time ago and aside from the adrenaline attacks of optimism you are weak, but they will never know this, they cannot know this, they have to believe that you're an inspiration, that you fought as hard as you could but it wasn't enough, that you never gave in, that your dying breath was a whisper of purity, that you are a godsend, an idol to be worshipped, you are the messiah. You are so brave.

This year will be bigger and better and involve less time in bed or possibly much more and this year will be loud and there will be bright lights and high heels and there will be hand holding and so many ******* hugs and I will eat pasta because I love pasta and I will not feel bad about that and I will make plans and then not cancel them and I will show up despite the knot in my stomach and I will laugh way too loud because I can and that is a beautiful thing and I will treat new acquaintances like old friends because people like it when you do that because it makes them feel good about themselves and I will make people feel good about themselves because that is a beautiful thing and I will feel good about myself because I deserve that and I will eat three meals a day and exercise and sleep eight hours a night because I deserve that and I will buy an unnecessary but adorable sweater every now and then because I have earned that and I will tell people I love them because they have earned that and they deserve to hear that and I will mean it when I tell people that life is great because I deserve that.

i injected caster sugar into my veins and i’m still waiting for the high to hit. i drew a smiley face on the desk at school and they called me a delinquent and i think they overreacted a bit, and they said that dreamers never go anywhere in life, but i’m writing this on the moon.

One day I’m going to see your stormy, blue eyes again and they will flash with recognition of my face and I will try telling myself that seeing you again is not fate.

Do you know that it’s in the way
you move;
that the breath of mine outlined the heart
of yours
and my body beat as a whole.
It’s in the drumming waves that
I found myself suffocating in the
raw submission of your hands and the
gentle rhythm of the hum that went
“alive
alive
alive.”

Not that it was supposed to mean anything
in the beginning,
but that it graced the blueprints of
my veins and shook the bones
in me,
and protruded from me,
and grounded me
into a grave of every fear
and bore roots of taboo words
on my tongue.

Not that I was supposed to feel anything,
but I did.

I'd like to be able to write again, but the universe is turning too slow in the wrong direction.
My heart drips instead of duh-dums
And my breath slips.

Rhyming sticks to the top of my mouth catching grains of rhythm as I regurgitate yesterday's thoughts.

I haven't been able to write lately, not because I am a bumbling busy body, but because time is frozen, I'm cemented and dissolving into the tasteless air.
Everything is too colourful lately, too... anything for me to understand.

Maybe I should start reading again, go back to painting stale blue skeleton hands with not enough paint.

Maybe that's my problem... There's not enough paint in my life.

We are critical.

We find flaws in
everything we see
because nobody
wants to write
about perfection,
even though sometimes
we wish we could just stay
staring into that
unblemished surface.

2. We are never satisfied.

We live our lives upon
mountains of
scrunched up
bits of refill and
ideas we gave up
trying to
express.

3. We never forget.

We write words about
eye contact made
three months ago
that we replay over
and over in our minds
even though it
stopped
being relevant.

4. We are fickle.**

Our emotions flash
from one
to the other
like strobe lighting that
disorientates us
until we feel as if
the world
will never be still.

5. We are exposed.

We don't know how
to keep our feelings
to ourselves so
we'll write them
down for
you to find
'accidentally'.

6. We are vulnerable.

We wear our
hearts on our sleeves
and won't lift a
muscle to fight back
if somebody tries
to break it
because we thrive
from the pain.

7. We will never stop.

We will never stop
feeling and
we will never stop
hurting,
we will never stop
breaking and
bleeding and
loving
even though the cycle
is endless
and we know what's
coming next.


We are addicted
to agony,
but we agonise
for the art.

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