what they don't know is that I said "absolutely not" to his offer of marriage as I laughed through shiny teeth and then we made sweet sweet love upon his former companions divan and we desecrated  the room we burnt that **** Down he lit 300 candles on fire to profess his burning passion to me and he proved it to me with his eyes and drooling lips I can't believe I believed the lie I was blinded by the orange glow that I so loved it made my intestines quiver as I gargled salt water I felt like  Mumbai as the colors surrounded me but the stench overwhelms me I could not breathe and for a moment I felt safe in my own skin as I lay there listening to the uneven sound of his breathing and the way his heart beat matched mine, I'm not joking, EXACTLY the soft glow of the tube flashed against the poorly painting cream walls that we left marks on it was a battle field or a storm and now we lay in the eye of that which our love is swirling about ready to destroy one another over and over and over again I can't take it my body was not made for such violence my heart begs for love and gives love only but yet it does not receive and it is not because it is incapable but it is because those who surround me are so unwilling to open theirs for fear of letting a dark being inside to shatter the windows of their home they have spent their entire lives building and because of this they do not expand they do not grow they are scared they fear and they tell themselves over and over again "I cannot do it" we all reach this point but at this moment of saying you cannot is when you must

I find myself missing the feeling of going to war, constant conflict, broken bottles and 18 hours missing time, counting down from 10 towards blackout, the feeling that any moment we will receive the call to arms we've been expecting and take to the streets with righteous anger, we are the only nightlife we've ever known, barely recognizable through the residue on our lips and the collection of small plastic bags on the kitchen table, whose edges have been burned closed so many times they have become numb to their own purpose, I pick what I want to hear from the consuming noise, I am talking to those guys from down the block about anarchy for the hundredth time, they still aren't convinced and neither am I, I am the holy burnout, I weave mythology into my skin and hope it sticks, I am naked and coming down in the living room, I am burning down the alleyways, I am screaming EVERYBODY WAKE UP at apartment complexes and dormitories, I am something on the radio, singing harmonies to my arrogance, I am cocky and I am young and I am pretty and I am angry, I am double nickels on the dime with two middle fingers raised when the cops drive by, I am failing to realize what is happening here, I am unconscious, I beg and I steal and I **** and fight and pass out around the time the sun rises, my neuroses tell me don't look back you can never look back, and then it hits, all at once, full collapse, illusion shattered, I am watching my brothers watch my tail lights disappear from the porch in my rear view mirror, I never considered that I could be a coward, I'd just never been tested, back to the crumbling house, shoulder to the wheel, straight on through the night, following stars I used to know the names of, I pull in the driveway, I tell myself under my breath, don't look back you can never look back

A gut wrenching unforgiving livid catastrophe is making a home in my bones and will eventually burrow itself out of my skin to make my mouth a puppet to my worst fears and insecurities,
I am bleeding, crumbling, don't you dare utter a single ******* word to me, I don't want to hear any of it,
Nothing on this earth could rot my bones faster than the feeling of failure when I try my hardest to be successful,
A pathetic poet putting on the facade of feeling mediocre at best, I am at my lowest, I just don't want to show it,
My breaths are being stolen one by one by the devil and he knows it,
The steam rising from the streets of my anxiety are making my vision foggy and all I want right now is to lay in the embrace of bad intentions in hopes that it'll let me rest my weary eyes and make me feel right in the mean time, because nothing good ever feels right,

No matter how tall I build myself, you could easily come crash all of my walls down without even trying that hard
Maybe that's a good thing,
Maybe my walls are hurtful,
Maybe that's a bad thing,
Maybe I'm just too exhausted to deal with any of it, so I don't,

I'm so sorry
I am so sorry

I don't want to breakdown, but now seems like a good a time as any,
I feel like I am sinking and sinking, and the lower I get, the easier it is to just let it happen,
Maybe I need to shut the **** up and just let it happen,

I am constantly torn between trying to create a home and trying to escape one,
Oh lovely helplessness, I've come looking for help again,
Wrap your arms around me and tell me I'm okay again,
Isn't this everything I need,
Isn't this everything right for me,
I can barely breathe, but isn't this good for me,
Better to lose my breath than to get choked out of it,
You always made me lose my breath, I wish you would've just choked me out of it,

How unfortunate, picking flowers to fill my head with anything other than ugly thoughts, I wish it worked,
I wish all of this just worked,
I've lost motivation, I need to help myself, I just don't want to work,

I couldn't be better for you,
I couldn't help you,
I didn't know how,
I was trying so hard, but you just left

*I'm sorry

Everything at once,
Now nothing at all,
A cycle recycled over and over until it is the last thing my mind can get a grasp on, the only thing I can rely on,

Friends, enemies, on, off, stuck

Stuck

Between the wall of abundance and the wall of isolation,
Finding love in the rubble,
Forming friendships from the dirt of the garden, picking flowers to give to hopelessness,
A toast risen to the collapse of the modern poet,
Surrounded by wreckless abandon and driven out by the fear of living,
The fear of not being enough,
The fear of being too much,
The fear of a little bit of everything,

Taken by the hand and shown true beauty, wiping tears away from the face that's too far exhausted to even make out in broad daylight,
A disaster,
A broken messiah picking gospels out of the hairs of broken hearts trying to mend,

I,
The soldier,
The commander,
We, they, us,
A figment of a wild imagination trying to thread the string of suicide together with the string of optimism, getting stuck on the pessimism catching the needle at every vice,

I will suffice,
I,
The soldier,
The commander,
Fighting a war with no winner,
Stopping to rest my head on the headstones of the forgotten,
Please do not forget about me when I am gone,
Paint my flowers golden and light a cigarette while doing so,
Lay them together on my grave, and, instead of a moment of silence, raise your lighter to my name and read to yourself quietly,

I,
The romantic,
The saddened,
The disaster,
The punk playing music so loud it vibrates your thoughts,
I, the remembered,
I will go out in flames just like how I showed up in flames,

You, try your best for me
I am not much, but trust me, I am worth it

Snap necked seraphim
Poltergeist afterlife
The difference between seeing and believing
The difference between knowing and understanding
The difference between wanting to know and wanting to understand
The beatniks and their denim
Our fears and how we treat them
Heartbreak and soaking it all in
Love and blowing it all out
******* it all in and pretending it doesn't hurt
Letting it all out and letting everyone know it ******* hurts

A lot

Spraying perfume on plastic flowers to make sure no one knows they are fake
Spraying perfume on yourself to make sure know one knows you are fake
Beauty supreme, yeah they were right about you
Kissing the lips of destruction to get a taste of what living feels like
A bystander to your own existence, choking and gasping on what little tangible feeling you have left
From the way that you acted to the way that I felt it, from the way that I acted to the way that you didn't feel any of it
You lucky *******
I'm miserable and you haven't noticed, nothing new there
I wish I couldn't miss you, I wish I didn't see you at all

If I die, I will die a martyr
If I die, I want these words to soak into your veins instead of the alcohol and nicotine
I want to be the only thing you feel
I was always selfish, I might as well embrace it

The Devil lives in all things
In my skin, tattooing sins down my neck so bold I had to grow my hair to hide them all under it
In my grandmothers voice as she drifted back and forth across decades of indecision and compromise in a haze of narcotics and brutal nostalgia
In my best friends veins, always waiting until the lights went out before putting on a shadow puppet show of The Fall on his bedroom walls
In my fathers fists, clenched tight around anything that reminded him of an almost could have been,
In my older brothers brain, filling the holes that pride and drugs left there with a manic depressive war that can only be won through surrender
In my younger brothers heart, weaving together his arteries until he had grown too cold to speak through no fault of his own
In my sisters pen, scribbling out music notes to a melody that would remind her forever of where she had come from and the ghosts she could not escape
In my lovers tears, tasting only separation and the bitterness of memory and the pollution of rivers once pure,
I cross myself, once, twice, thrice
I speak the words
I exorcise the Devil
I show him a card trick
He seems impressed
He lights my cigarette
We keep each other company
We both have a long way to go,
The night is too dark to be alone
And we both know we won't keep till morning

Stop leaving me here to kiss the ghost of my better self
Why are you messing up again and again

spread my blood on your walls with the hands that once held my heart so delicately

I think I've become the thing that you saw in your nightmares tearing you limb from limb

you've only made me feel like I'm drowning in the dark ocean rather than burning in your light

the last time I saw you, you looked so happy

I'm so sorry for pushing you all away but is it saving myself from being hurt or is it just my selfishness

I don't know how to handle the tears that seep through my clothes anymore because they're making me freeze

I'm sick of everyone saying that things will be okay because there's a few months of good until you get **** on again

I don't exist anymore to you
And definitely not to them

For some reason that I don't think I will ever understand, they built a house inside me and then lit it aflame just to see me burn

Do I understand why they lied?
No
Will I ever?
No

I'm sorry but it may not seem like it but I was giving you my all but I guess that just wasn't good enough because you were running away like wolves

And to be honest I don't even think that it's still you that I'm missing, just something that burns cigarette holes in my heart once again

it's always been my dream to be empty but now that I am I don't feel content

Everything that I am doing now is not what I imagined to be doing 2 months ago

I've drank so much to forget your ways
This feeling of wanting you comes but never stays

I miss the dark side of my emotions because at least then I had a reason to be upset because this feeling in my chest is suffocating

I am not sad
I am not mad
I am not glad

This is an existence that is rotting into my skin
Writing down all of this does not help ease the pain

Imaginary friend
I am conjuring you up in my head because all of my friends left me for dead

I am writing this in my head by the first light of morning while you sleep beside me
I am lying awake
I am counting your breaths, translating each one as a confirmation that I transcribe to hieroglyphics with my fingertips on your stomach
I am memorizing where every part of your body is located in relation to mine and I am taking steps to maintain proportions
I am letting my hair become tangled in yours because I am afraid of not touching you
I am deconstructing this moment as it unfolds, letting it envelop the alarm clocks and my sense of self
I am reconstructing my visions of the future
I am reconstructing myself to fit accordingly
I am born again
I have never been touched
I have never been kissed or broken or ****** or bruised
I am letting myself be made clean
You open your eyes periodically, look me in the face, then fall back asleep
I am reminded of watching the sky for hours in my youth because I never wanted to miss even one shooting star
I never regretted the exhaustion then, and I **** well won't now

"*******!" screamed the drunken poet stumbling into the door with a half smoked cigarette in one hand and a coffee stained journal in the other

I asked why I wasn't worth the effort and you asked me if it was a rhetorical question,
Rain will fall and fill in the gaps we leave for space to make a home,
The clouds will crowd above our heads to choose between regret and anger; which will make our day more miserable,
We will collapse under the pressure of trying harder than anyone ever has for the things we hold near and dear to us,

A society dying of emotional asphyxiation,
Warmongers threatening the very last thing keeping them from falling off the edge,
Innocence showcased through picking flowers and sharing smiles,
We are broken and we are picking up the pieces one cut at a time,

Gutting the stomachs of lovers and creating sculptures in memory of the undeserving,
Setting fire to everything we're used to in order to create room for the risks we finally aren't afraid to take because of the exhaustion pulling us as far down as we can possibly go,

We sure are a mess, but at least we're giving it our best
Distressed and lost, only hoping to find ourselves in one another,
I want to get as lost as possible, that way I will feel confusion once again; at this point I am used to knowing everything before it even happens,
Or maybe that's just my anxiety making me create situations that haven't even happened yet,
Or maybe I really am a mess,
Or maybe I just need to be told it's okay,
Or maybe I need to embrace the fact that I'm a madman with a twisted messiah complex

All I know is that at the end of the day, I spill my coffee just as much as you do,
I smoke as many cigarettes as I need to,
I find happiness in everything before my sadness does,
I sure am a mess, but at least I am giving it my best,
I am alive, so I might as well live