I am angry for the way your eyes touched mine, how
They looked at me and without thinking, made contact,
You
Opened your mouth and the word beautiful
Fell out

I don't know if it was the 2 am restlessness or
the alcohol speaking but
What you said burned a pit in my stomach
I planned on filling it with your smile but
you stopped sharing it with me

I wanted to pile the void high with the thought of how your
Hand pushed hair behind my ear and
Your arms reaching out like you needed me

You told me,
I was beautiful
Whether or not it was an accident does not matter when
I can still feel how your breath felt brushing my cheek as you spoke and
How I blushed, laughing, turning my head to break the connection
I shook it in response saying,

"No, I am not"

Because beautiful things don't confess to their own knowledge of being

You said yes
I said no,

Because beauty is a privilege I have never been allotted

You said yes, you are
I said okay

I don’t know why you had to tangle truth into a lie
If I were truly beautiful to you, you would say hello and still mean it
I'd like to think that if I really were, you would want nothing else but to hold me at all hours of the day, to
Kiss the face you held in your palms and just watch the up and down of my eyelashes but
You don't and I understand, it's okay

It has been a month or two since you spilled poison into my open heart and
for the first time I am remembering this encounter,
It is too sweet for your now bitter
I ask myself why I still think of you and
I know it is due to the way you spoke to me, how
You touched me too gently for too long
Your fingerprints left holes in my memory foam skin, I let you get too close.

This is simply sadness that
is too tired to morph into anger
I am only angry in how you made roses out of words
to plant them in my garden, unfit to grow
I could never keep much else alive besides myself and
everything dies out eventually
I should have guessed that we would too.

I have manipulated this poem
To be a mask of emotions
Not letting you know
I am falling apart
Because bulimia is only for girls

Men do not reject their self worth
Due to pressure from society
A consistent of not good enough
Photoshopped billboards

Recalling my most recent meal
In attempt to match my expectations
The ones I have created for myself
Through tainted understandings
Of the world around me

I used to think I couldn't go a day without your smile. Without telling you things and hearing your voice back.

Then, that day arrived and it was so **** hard but the next was harder. I knew with a sinking feeling it was going to get worse, and I wasn't going to be okay for a very long time.

Because losing someone isn't an occasion or an event. It doesn't just happen once. It happens over and over again. I lose you every time I pick up your favorite coffee mug, whenever that one song plays on the radio, or when I discover your old t-shirt at the bottom of my laundry pile.

I lose you every time I think of kissing you, holding you, or wanting you. I go to bed at night and lose you, when I wish I could tell you about my day. And in the morning, **when I wake and reach for the empty space across the sheet, I begin to lose you all over again.

It was jaded submission.  It was competition.  It was the breath between hiding and fully addressing the existence of another human body.  This is where she lived.   This millisecond behind making eye contact with a stranger on a bus at 7:48 am speeding through a moping city with her backpack slung around her shoulder, filled to the brim with grapefruits because her 57 year old cancer-hoarding ******* of a father always refuses to sell the grocery store and thinks vitamin C is super important.  She watched tired bodies try to ignore the fact that they were born with legs and brains and hearts.  Motivated by waves of coffee and the kisses their significant others sleepily planted on their foreheads before reminding them to hunker down in their bus seat and get some reading done, she watched these people ignore the fact that a long time ago their parents decided to **** the brains out of each other.  Maybe if she sat there longer one of them would look up from the palms of their hands.  This was a morning like any other morning, a morning without feeling.  A morning without heavy. She didn’t actually care that much.  That was the trick; She just wanted to believe she did.

People, like swarms of ants.  People like tornadoes.  People like an earthquake, running from one edge of the street to the edge of a different alley.  And nobody looked up.  Nobody knew where to put their hands.  This was the thing that got her;  Nobody ever knew what to do with their hands.  It was only when they ignored it, when they forgot the existence of their body that they actually knew how to touch the things in front of them, that they effortlessly existed like oxygen exists without color.  Maybe that was the point of life:  If you wanted to get through it you had to forget you were moving.

I hope you believe me when my I tell you my body is composed of more than a skin and bone frame.
My body is a picture book of times stained to me like tattoos of memories unable to be washed off.
If you stare closely enough my purple knuckles tell a story of walls caving in on days I can't remember.
My fingers are a light shade of skin because they have traced bodies who's pigment fell in love with my hands.
My palms are empty from receiving and giving a little more than I should of let go; some things I should of clutched onto for longer.
My arms are made of clenched embrace and have a scent of regret laced from wrist to elbow.
My shoulders hold individual carvings of finger nails and teeth marks from more than one individual night.
My lips are a discolored red from every poison stained mouth in which they've met.
My neck is a canvas of rough hands, ropes not tied tight enough and purple stains of affection from those who have lied about loving me,
and my eyes have turned grey from staring for too long into the forests and oceans they've met at three in the morning in the caves of unfamiliar faces.
So if you happen to walk into my room, don't be alarmed by the smell of apathy. Don't concern yourself about the bottles buried and broken under mounds of clothes that reek of Marlboros. Don't turn the light on, and don't open the curtains.
I have lived long enough, my body will tell you the story.
But before you read it, please trust me when I say "there is more to me than this."

Where lives are saved and lives are lost,
Transparent waves simmering and smoking,
Festering natives shouting 'bon voyage,'
Against the colossal empty carcass of stone.

We were alive, we were one.
Like you said in the sloppy mud,
The surreptitious metal clashing,
Screaming its choiring shout of affirmation.
The deity that strung us by the neck,
Forcing us to choke on our natural *****.

The door has closed.
Let it be heard in a whisper
In the evanescent air.
Like the pairing of two great crashing waves.

I remember that twilight tulip's lip,
The cupid's bow puckered earnestly yet forsaken.

And with our bodies braced
We raise the anchor,
Bearing our scopes far beyond the horizon.
A never ending sail in the wind.