It's scary after dark
The moon doesn't quite reach you
The shadows cast are all new
Footsteps echo behind
You say it is just your mind
A hand reaches out
You prepare yourself to shout
A cloth
You gag and cough
Bitter taste
You should have made haste
You fall onto the concrete
What fate will you meet

Writing words down
Using my brain as the generator
And my hands as the output
Writing whatever words I think
Brings the feeling of freedom
Of censorship
Of being lost inside
The vast sea of my brain.

curled wrists folded within crumpled sheets
heartbeats gently flutter beneath my skin
drunk on dreams as I nestle
further and deeper into oblivion
however my mind is choking
mental reminders of things past
objectives to complete
work to be finished
I, bleary eyed, weary *****
assume a vacant mind
fixed to a beat body
mess of movements, mess of thoughts
3am is so unkind
to a lonely longing mind

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.

You sugar-coat our future
With a cotton-candy kiss;
A sweet slip of tongue,
A chocolate press of lips

Your eyes yield a bittersweet gleam,
Your hair, tangled with icing grease,
But things are never what they seem,
Everything must go, all things must cease

My dear, your love is sweeter than all things sweet,
Your touch softer than all things soft,
I feel high on sugar when our lips meet,
But to a sugar low we are opt.

remember when
you would write
all your poems
about me

how you 
carelessly
would leave
your breathless
i love yous
in between
each line
like a secret
between the
two of us

hidden behind
your words
were our
held hands 
and our
stollen kisses

and your 
written art
was our love
translated
into the 
language of
the stars 

you created
a tiny universe
with every
line and curve
of every letter
and it was
paradise 

yet those 
days are 
far gone

and our
universe,
our heaven
was swallowed
whole by the 
boundless waves
of oblivion

you erased
the romance
and replaced
them with
stains of 
infinite farewells

now you
hold a pen
like its a
loaded gun
prepared to
shoot

and you
stare at 
the paper
like a
selfish god
depriving
a blank galaxy
the beauty
of constellations

and i just miss
your poetry

i feel
like i have
been evicted
from my own
home because
i lived
in your words

i found shelter
in the pages
you have filled
with your messy 
penmanship

so with 
shaky hands
and a heavy heart,
i try to recreate
the phrases
you have
written with
your heartbeat

but nothing
compares
to the image 
of our love
immortalized
in your poems

this is the poem you're too self indulged to write
then everything is going okay it's easy to cover your ears and let your eyes play tricks on themselves and go to work and do your homework and lay in his bed the day after she did and not think anything of it, but once he says that one thing or does that one too many times you manage to pull the horse blinds off and see what's happening.
this is the poem you're not self-indulgent enough to write
love is tricky. it may be one of the most common concepts us as humans cannot seem to figure out but us, as humans, as a species, we need love to exist. without the eyes and hands and time from another person it starts to feel like we aren't really even here, that maybe somehow by being independent and alone you start to fade away, like another person in the crowd whose face you'll never quite be able to remember- but when you're in love, every color seems to go brighter and the feeling in the pit of your stomach makes you drive faster and your legs shake ten times easier. it makes time slower and faster at the same time and the sky seem bluer and the world a little neon.
maybe this is the poem you're too blinded to write
love is not supposed to hurt. love is work, and somewhere along the road you'll have to kick and fight and scream to make that love work but in the beginning, the little bit, it's not supposed to feel like glass on skin it's supposed to be smooth and silky and for whatever reason us as humans, as species, we decided that the more effort we put into something that's difficult the more important to us it should be and the more attached we should feel, but sometimes it's okay to let go. I'm telling that to you, but I'm telling that to me.
this is the poem you're too tired to write, because when you spend your time working and going to class and fighting for the only person who you've ever really felt but you've never been able to keep a grip on and it isn't fair because you deserve to be able to hold onto something other than your own hand, your eyes start to grow weak, and so do your arms and your legs and especially your heart, because when love hurts, when love becomes something that's really terribly bad, what's left? what's supposed to get you through the day when the one emotion that's supposed to lift you up leaves you aching and collapsed on the ground?
this is the poem no one should ever have to write
I struggle to call love an emotion, because in this sense love is a verb. like "I loved with all that I had until I couldn't stand anymore and then I was just collapsed loving you more and more and than you held her hand in front of me and didn't talk to me for three days and I thought if I loved you anymore my skin would burst and I'd just be on the ground aching and hyperventilating and screaming your name wondering why everyone makes love seem good because love is just bad, it's just broken glass and long drives because if you cry anymore your head will fog up again, it's wanting to write but not wanting to write because you've reached the point of a horrible mixture of exhaustion, sadness, pain and adoration that you can't even get the pen to the paper, it's feeling so much that not even words can explain it, like driving by his house because when you see her car out front your arms go numb and for whatever reason you like to make it hurt even more, for some ****** up reason, for some ****** up ******* reason you're a dumb ******* miserable human who only let's herself feel more miserable and let's herself fall more in love and refuses to end the vicious cycle of you and him and him and her and you only wanting him but him wanting you and also kind of wanting her but wanting her more than you and knowing that and just wanting to collapse on the ground. for the 6th time this week, and it's only wednesday"
this is the poem I should have written the
minute I heard there was another one
the minute I found out that love has conditions and that sometimes love is felt when it should not be felt. sometimes it'll pop in your head during a meaningless task and you'll realize you can't run from inside of your head no matter how much you wish you could and during those moments you won't think to write this poem, you'll just collapse. you'll only collapse and call him and tell him you miss him and he'll say something too fast and too quiet and you'll realize she's in front of him so he can't say he loves you back and it'll **** you. but you'll stay on the ground. and you'll stay with him.
this is the poem you're too guilty to write, and too confused and too in love. but you waited and you waited for someone to come and for it to click and for you to get him and him to get you and when it came you didn't realize there'd be conditions, and when you had them in front of you, you didn't realize you could say no to them. so I guess in a way this is a poem you waited to write, but you never realized it'd be so bittersweet. that sometime love poems aren't about love at all, but about losing it and the pain of it all, and being the girl who goes there, and the girl who met him and became really really good at pronouns but really bad at tenses and deciphering between first person and second person, and started talking in third person a few dozen poems ago and forgot how to get back into her own skin.
this is the poem you should never have to write, and if you ever do I hope you notice and you leave. because love might be tricky, but love should also be great. you should only ever be at the brink of collapsing before they come over and pick you up, you should never be on cold tile on your roommates bathroom floor too exhausted to stand up and screaming too loud and crying too hard to move when he's in bed with her, sound asleep. she's warm, and his arms are around her, and you're shivering on cold tile, and you're writing a poem you never thought you'd have to write.