A friend asked me
how to be a writer.
I wanted to say,
lock yourself in a room,
scream until you have
a poem and no voice.
Open your veins and bleed
until you know that your bones
are pure words and sorrow.
Act as if you slit your own throat
and all you can bleed
are your own regrets
and all of the darkness
you boxed up for inspiration.
Write your mom a letter,
tell her you're leaving
and you won't be back for awhile
Because being a writer is traveling
through all seven layers of Hell
and denying anything is wrong.
Forget loving yourself
when all you have is a pen and paper
fused to your wrist
and Jesus is tapping at your skull
saying turn back now.
Warn the neighbors that if they smell burning
It's just your soul
clawing at the front door trying to get in.
Learn how to be alone.
Learn how to lose everything you have
in order to feel release,
learn how to only feel deceased
from now on.
A friend asked me
how to be a writer.
All I said was
don't

the first time i met you, i had a beer in my hand
i pretended like a beer was enough to hush the voices in my head
i sat down next to you
you asked me if i wanted anything stronger, so i made my own
i didn't know your name
you were singing, you were laughing, you were smiling at me
you told me your name
i told someone i was good at pingpong
you told me you wanted to play me
i sat there hoping that it'd be tonight
you were smiling at me
i couldn't stop looking at you
my phone kept buzzing, the guy i thought i loved thought he loved me
you asked me to follow you downstairs
i couldn't play ping pong for ****
you kept smiling, i kept shaking
i kept drinking
i kept drinking
i kept pretending like you didn't interest me
i don't remember the rest of the night
all i could do was hope
hope for another night with you
i kept drinking
you kept smiling

Miss, Atomic Bomb,
how are you today?

Do you feel a jittering in your veins,
hear a chattering of ivory teeth
in your sugar skull
candied by your wish to always be oh-so-sweeter?

When you fell to the ground under his hands,
rough with militant knuckles
tattooed in unlined blues and purples
transforming into nausea-inducing camouflage hues,
and your new, Target brand, $2.99 black tights
ripped viciously at the knees,
did you feel an explosion in your chest?

Did you feel angry,
willing to lash out with toxic words
that your floodgates had always tried to hold back,
the dams now creaking and groaning in beautiful sighs?

Did you,
when it hurt,
fight against that war hero who had held you close
during a time you could barely remember,
blurred crimsons shading the edges of every smiling photograph?

Or did you fold him into your campfire-scented embrace
and apologize profusely
for being so naturally destructive?
I bet you open your lips-
swollen and bleeding through cracks
that could define
‘damaged’
in the dictionary you flip through
when everything is numb,
and only battle wounds of paper cuts will suffice-
just to speak those awful words.

I bet
you allowed him to tell you
that you were a weapon-
self-triggering,
horrific,
prepared to injure
those
innocent,
pink-lipped,
blue-eyed girls he stared at on the street
just to keep what you had.

But,
Miss Atomic Bomb,
someone had to have dropped you.
someone had to have thrown you
from your security,
and I bet against life itself
that the guilt lies in those calloused palms.

I bet you never noticed
the rope tied around your ankle,
expertly knotted so that he could just keep
reeling you back up into his arms.

He liked you on that verge of manic destruction,
eyes wide,
holding onto oceans threatening to flood that little studio apartment of yours
in New York City.

He wasn’t ready to let you truly fall.
He still isn’t.

So,
Dear Atomic Bomb,
know that that
run in your tights is only the beginning of the end.
The scraped flesh on your knees
is only the beginning of
the carnage that could be wrought.

And none of it will be your fault,
your *******, crumbling-at-the-seams fault.

You won’t cause the war,
and you can still crawl out on
shrapnel-coated limbs.

Take my heed,
little girl –
desert.

I look up
at the stars,
and sometimes I
think of all
the parallel
universes and
hope to ****
I’m doing better in
one
of them.

How can a ruin look so beautiful?

So articulate in its confusion?

Broken, but not lost?
Or at least the parts that didn't wonder off with the wind

Memories laying bare
          Scattered
          Exposed

How can something so broken look so fragile?