it's one o'clock in the morning
and it smells of drugstore perfume, daisies
mixed with something attempting
to be sweeter than sugar
when its truly salt
swirled together with
arsenic and my vapid feelings.

it's one o'clock in the morning
and it feels like static, like the fuzziness
on television screens and the
sensation of the wires in my
brain snapping from this exhaustion
that was never there till i
gave up on the phantom innocence i'd been
clinging to in the hopes it
was still clinging onto the shreds of
clothing at my feet.

it's one o'clock in the morning
and it looks as though everything has been
painted monochrome. it's a series
of hazy greys and blurry whites, but
it's mostly a black delved so dark
i can't see anything through it; it's
not transparent enough to even
glance at the stars blinking down
toward the earth because the nighttime
won't let me see anything but mysteries
and untouched memories.

it's one o'clock in the morning
and it tastes like blood, so much
blood. there's metal on my tongue
and it's everywhere because there's no
knife anywhere, just this transpiercing
pain in my stomach and my lungs are
being sliced open and the gore of my guts
is spilling onto the tile floor and there's
blood covering my hands and my
face is cracking against concrete and
i'm puking rainbows again
and it tastes of heartsickness.

it's one o'clock in the morning
and it sounds like nothing. it's
the kind of nothing that
everyone notices: the breath that
stops when one gets the news
that their loved one is leaving
them for good, the nothing after
a performance that's left everyone
contemplating the universe and love
and whether i actually want to
live at all, the silence following
the coffin being shut. it's the nothingness
of sobs and heartbreak and
death. it's the sound of
loneliness - particularly mine.

i'm trying to make memories with people who won't **** me but you're still there, and maybe you're always going to be there, and some memories do not heal for they are too powerful to drown in the ruin of myself and your poison is still lurking in my throat. nothing terrifies the marrow in my bones more than knowing that you are the pain in the back of my mind, and it has been six months since you left me dead, six months since my poems were all written on the moon instead of dreaming of the stars, six months since you slurred that you swallowed tablets to detox me from you, six months. you. you are your smirk, you are your dumb pick up lines, you are your flirtatious text messages despite the lack of a relationship we hold, you are your stupid ******* rocker jeans and the way your eyes used to glint in the navy shade of 4am, smoke curled along the edge of your lip, your hand reaching for the belt loop of my jeans. nimble fingers hold guitar picks and make music as opposed to love and there was no love there at all, just the idea of it embedded in your teeth and in my hands in your hair and the smell of art and lust and strawberry chapstick and the wreckage of my being up in flames.

is my blood still lingering on the cracks of your lips? have i stained you?

i haven't heard from you
in six days time and i had
never felt more free
until you sent me one final
message thirty-seven
seconds ago: i hate you.

the feeling is
mutual.

it's okay to be sad.
it's just not okay to stay that way.

sometimes i feel
so much
i don't know
where
to put
it all
(is it supposed
to flow
out like a
river
or explode
out of my
mouth
or swallow
me
whole?)

i hold my breath in
an unsure pen.
my soul is battered,
beaten, and scarred and
i cannot decide if this
is a result of tragedy
or my disease; it's
more a painting of the
two, a swirling of the colors
which have turned me
black and blue and i
am not who i once
was for my breath has
escaped my lungs and
collapsed into the ink

of a pen whose melody
has not yet been
sung.

you've been sending me
text messages along
with slivers of the heart
you once claimed to own
and i cannot give
you anything of
mine because

there's nothing
left

i am hidden somewhere behind hushed
silences, sporadic breaths, and a
fluttering heartbeat

i am sat towards the front of the
class with tears brimming my eyes
and fingers dotted with blood and paint

maybe someone will see me someday

to the girl who wrote me asking
me for advice at four o'clock in the
morning when her brain was high
off of an ashy heart: stop
******* around with toxins, and
no, i don't mean the drugs
turning your life into
unwholesome chaos. i mean
your ******* friends who told
you that
your problems are nothing
your demons are nothing
you are nothing. stop
it. you're better than
them.

to the friend who asked
for advice on how to turn
herself into a walking
skeleton: get over
yourself. anorexia and
bulimia will not fill
some hole in your tragic
past, they will ravage everything
good in you until you
are nothing but the flesh
you have despised. do
not ask me how to "become
an anorexic" because all you
are asking me is how
to die.

to the boy who i have
dedicated so many poems
to: god, you are so oblivious
to everything. to the soulless
"i love you"s spoken out of
pity, to the feigned grins, to
the fact that you are ripping
me apart. i was always told
to not love someone
who was sad because they would
drag me to the pit of the ocean
with them, and i should
have listened. there isn't
enough of me left
to share.

words tangled in my ear like vines
and cackled laughter, hands balled
up in fists, a cacophony of everything
i'd ever been terrified of. my
mother never pondered where
the violet-blue patches of skin had
appeared nor where i'd lost
my tooth the last day of second
grade, discovered three days
later by a janitor in a pool
of blood from a fight
broken out on the little
girl with no one else.

the tooth fairy gave me a dollar
for the gap between my teeth
but the tooth itself had cost me
so
   much
         more

i-

well,
      ****.

rummaging through the drawers
of my closet, i find pieces of you
tucked into your old t-shirts
and the notes which cracked
my frowns into grins and the
guitar pick you'd left behind
along with your heart-

oh how i long to throw them to the flames.

stage 1 of therapy and i have not
made progress. the whispers
stalk me through the battlegrounds
of school corridors - "she tried
to off herself with anxiety pills and left
no letter full of blood"- there's
no part of me left to imagine.
why are my secrets never my own? do
they not belong to me, do they
not belong to me, do i
not belong to me?

stage 2 of therapy and i
am still so terrified
of funerals
and of coffins
and of suicide notes
and i
am so horrified that my heart is drowning
my body is bleeding i won't admit
this pains me so much and i must've
loved everyone so hard, so deeply
there's nothing left to share
this hurts so
this hurts so
this hurts so bad
the repetition is crushing my skull.

stage 3 of therapy and i am
not dead. i am not dead.
i am not dead. i think i'm
losing my sense of self and
everything lacks meaning
and i am dying
and the breath is struggling
and the lungs are struggling
and everything is struggling
and i am dying.
but i am not dead.

stage 4 of therapy and i haven't yet
shot down the parts of myself
attempting to strangle the blood
straight out of me
but i haven't shot myself, either.
which is progress.
progress.
little
by little
progress, a word which i have never
yet delighted in the pleasures of feeling.
progress.

i do not know if this
scares you

but someday,
i will no longer
drown your memory
by writing ****** poems
at 1:13 am

and you won't exist to me

fire and brimstone
and a grotesque attempt
at spontaneous combustion,
words crawling out of throats
and
hands, trembling
and
body, trembling, all over
and
sheer force of memory
splitting through rationality
until a bomb deteroriates
everything we used to
love,
including myself.

i am -
i am homesick for a person who
left when i forced him to leave,
pushing him out the door,
arms shaking,
tears cracking in the back of my throat,
and i hope i don't ruin you
when i know you will ruin me

and now - now it is
too late at night and
i hope the moon is not my only friend
because he has forgotten me
for a girl with ginger hair and a scar above her lip
who is just like me,
except that she's thin and vegan and doesn't like harry potter

and i -
i am convincing myself not to send text messages
i should have sent
before my eyes turned ancient with the ache
of heartbreak and he
refused to look at them.

messages i should have sent

2:14 am, day one
i miss you

3:23 am, day two
i still miss you
3: 24 am, day two
**** why did i make you go

6: 25 pm, one week later
do you remember when i thought
you hated me and when you thought
i hated you? that was
all lies.
is it still a lie?

6:26 pm, one month later
can we
still be friends? it's so hard to see you
in the hallway without
bursting
into
tears
and
flames.

12:01 am, three months later
halloween doesn't
taste the same and
sugar is more sour and sweet and the
moonlight dancing across the haunted street
is not beautiful to me anymore
because you are not apart of this.

4:34 am, seven months later
it is
the day of love and we spoke
for the first time in person since the
school dance a few months ago and my
heart
hurts so badly

3:57 am, eight months later
i am trying to love new people, better
people, and he tells me i am the world
to him but i
don't want him to love me because
he's
not
you

2:31 am, nine months later
i put you first, i always ******* put you
first, and i never made you feel a ****
thing.
2:33 am, nine months later
i still ******* miss you.
******* it.

now
i am trying to convince myself
i don't love you anymore
but it's growing so difficult because
                                                 because
maybe i still do
and i don't want to, i don't want this, i don't want him.
i don't.

he ignores me without reason
and does not try to be
my friend
and does not
look me in the eye

and he is the tear in my heart.

so, hello again,    
                        poetry.
will you be my lover now?

wind whistles through
the hollows of trees' tranquil
leaves and the silence cracks
against the coffin being shut
and i cry till my eyes
can sob no more

i do not miss you
except that i do

my knuckles cracked on solid concrete
and i swear
i shattered every bone in my body
one by one, crunching and
crackling and crying -
pause.
wait.
let me reiterate:
how dare you say
you miss me
when you stare
at me with eyes colder than the frozen tundra
accumulating along the walls of your arteries,
when i'm breaking my hands
over you using yours to
hold another's,
when you stare at me
like you never knew me at all
when you stare
at me as if
i'm dying, as if i'm
crumbling into dirt and dust and ruin
before you
but there's a question
which goes up in flames
each time i glance back
at you -
does love ever die?
and if so,
when will i?

the biting arctic winds have
snapped my frozen bones
in two pieces, the fragments
swirling in the air
and the oxygen goes
up in flames - my voice
has lilted and wavered
and cracked and
i don't want to say this
because i've never
delighted in admitting
the idiotic tendencies
of things and feelings
but i love you.

oh, god,
i love you.

stress blooming forward
in chest like
erratic butterflies flapping
away
and thoughts spiraling
down towards
my stomach where
they do not dissolve
in acid, no matter how
desperately
i ache for them
to leave me

times when
i think about my
future - they are not
etched in stone, they
are fleeting and temporary and as
miniscule as grains of sand

how could they be anything
more than dust
when the possibility
of any greatness
or worthiness
or meaning
is so
tiny, so
small
as to not
even
be there at all

someone once asked me what
love is like and my breath
ripped against my throat and
it took me three and one fourth seconds
too long to construct some
well-thought answer, and i
said the one syllable i could
manage would fill in the lost
puzzle piece for the question:

fire

and god, love is a fire
which singes the insides of your
unromanticized stomach and it
lilts and dances and flares in
orange-yellows and red-blues
and somehow the self-intoxication
of the high from the burning
feels so right. at some point,

the flames begin to engrave
acidic holes in your skin, circular
cigarette burns in your lungs,
lick the linings of your throat
with its fire and it hurts so bad
you throw the cure on top of it:
water, and the forest fire dies
with you. and at
some point you light up
another match, let the flames
erupt again. but

for now, there's only
ash and dust and exhausted
eyes and bones with singes
in the cracks and puddles from
quenched flames and
i'd wonder why the fire stopped
burning

except i'm glad it did.

i think my eyes were blue
before he thieved the colour
from the insides of me

i have lost myself
again
in the rain, in the sky, in you -

but the rain is going to pour
without you inside of it and
you will not land on my tongue

and the sky is will be lovely
without you residing in the clouds
and you will not remind me of its colour

not anymore

"angel, come clean,"
the river whispers
as if i were not
already in love with it,
as if it did not
harmonize with
the sound of my
beating heart,
thump-thump-thumping
in ethereal cacophany

scarlet drips between my thighs
and off my wrists,
and when i sink beneath
an ocean of blue,
it runs red,
and
relief sprouts out
of lungs, finally, finally--

and then
i dream of
water rising
and collapsing
lungs,
all that breath swallowed up
like a siren song

heaven is a ***** liar
pleading for forgiveness;
the truth is buried
at the bottom of
a freshwater river
in the decaying hands of
a skeleton
who yearned for
eternal solace

i can taste
heartache and it tastes
like blood and shattered promises.

god, you are
so beautiful
i want to
drown myself
in your
love i am tired
of developing
an ill
stomach over
someone who
will never love
me back i fall
in love with
people who
scar my
heart and
bruise my
arms and
burn my
thighs, people
who have
made me
scream in
the middle
of the
night but you,
god you are
so beautiful
i want to
drown myself
in your
love.

every night i see you in my
dreams and you write to me
sometimes and it makes me
feel as though the earth beneath
my feet was tugged from
me and i keep falling onto
shards of broken glass and cracked
heartbeats and yet there's this
cavernous hole in the gap in
my chest from where i tore out
my heart, shredding the threads
keeping my heartstrings together
so they could hold the wounded
***** there and throwing it to
the blood-eyed devil who
swallowed it whole and i am nothing
without the pain which has
molded me from ash and dirt
and dust

but i wonder
why love is still a thing to yearn for
especially because it hurts so bad

someone asked me over the phone
if i wanted to **** myself and i
regurgitated every pitiable
answer you'd expect to discern from
the most normal of people and a few years
ago i never would've lied but acting
is a state of mind as opposed to a
state of art and it's so necessary for me
because someone asked
me over the phone if i wanted
to **** myself and the truth
was so difficult to handle
that i bled black blood from
the wound in my mouth, the
hole had been singed there
when i began feeling
like the knife lodged in
my stomach wasn't nearly
enough pain yet when do we
begin to enjoy the euphoric
disasters of adventures
with a warning sign shrieking
out: DANGER DEATH AHEAD
when do we stop crying when
we take too many pills when
do we stop praying to a god
who never loved us in the
first place when does
our innocence rust from
its original golden surface but
there isn't an answer to that
rambling of a sentence i'm afraid
and the dark rainclouds moving
in the distance have thunder resounding
in my headaches and getting
closer by the hour and i want
to cry, i used to be so much
sweeter than this but someone
asked me over the phone if
i wanted to **** myself

and i lied
because i did.

"why?"*

my breath hitched at
the question and i
thought my heart
would jump straight
from my ribcage, and
maybe i knew it would,
because you do
not want to know
why or when or how i
stopped loving
you

you just want me
to hold your
hand again, you
want the nights of
sugar-tainted lips
and whispers of i love you,
i love you when the
world around you shattered
and pieces of the broken
sky felt like the glass
shards in your lungs

you never really
wanted me
you just wanted
a hand to hold