I am just five years old
Unable to escape knowing too much
I cannot tell why everything is so heavy
But still I choose to carry it
I am just twelve years old
Splitting open my skin
Under the guise of control
And dripping with self disgust
Screaming at the world
DOES ANYONE HEAR ME
PLEASE
CAN ANYONE SEE ME
PLEASE
I DON'T WANT TO DIE
I am just fifteen years old
Lying because I can
And getting away with it too
Touched by the wrong hands
Empty inside
And I'm not sure that I care
Even when I return to my bed and do not feel safe inside of it
At least somebody is touching me
I am just eighteen years old
My fathers words exploding out of my mouth
I hate the way I used to speak to my mother

At almost twenty years old
I have learned to swallow my self loathing

I cannot unbecome her
I cannot **** her
I can only embrace her

I'm sorry

First kiss
Like fireworks exploding inside of me
I wonder if you feel sad today too?
I can't just be a distant memory
What do I do with this
Overwhelming
and overflowing
I feel you all around me still like a ghost
But the memory is inescapable
Gunpowder explodes
Your breath is on my neck
Thousands of colors and lights
Whispered I love yous
This torture chamber echoing endlessly

You are like them
Explosive and angry
And absolutely stunning

There are years worth of puncture wounds on his soul
Does he feel them with every rise and fall of his chest?
Someone knew exactly where to scar him
So that nobody would see how much burden he has been left to carry
I am close enough to know that everything is not as easy as he makes it out to be
Sometimes when he holds me and I run my fingers through his hair
I think her hands might’ve found the same place atop his head
One day they still may
But for now he unwillingly holds this heaviness

I plead sometimes
Let me take it from him
Just for a little while

Now this restless night
All is familiar
But not quite the same as before

Sure
There were the dreams
But the way you smelled
And the sound of your voice
Has been slipping away from me for months

Now this restless night
My trembling body closes its eyes
And does not need to sleep or dream
To see you behind it’s eyelids
I have not slept when I get up to go
I do not kiss anyone goodbye the way I might have a different pair of lips
I do not listen to the haunting snores
Coming from the wrong side of the bed

Now this restless night
I shut the door quietly behind me
But here is my secret
I wanted to slam the door and run!
Far away from these feelings
Far too large to leave them behind in this place
Or tuck into my jacket
Far, far too large

Softly seeping into a rhythm of uncertainty

And unknowingly a soft summer breeze

Turns into a turbulent and terrifying tornado

I pretend I am an avid consumer of literature

Of Frost of Whitman and Angelou

Yet I couldn’t comprehend the shift in the weather

Or it could have been that I did not want to understand

How sunlight stinging the back of my eyelids

Could become puddles soaking through my socks

And ruining my favorite sneakers

Alas I skipped joyfully home

With the memory of sunshine in my pocket

And rain flooding the gutters

My first lover and I were far too alike
We gave everything too fast, and collided at high speeds
And I am still not able to find the words to describe how deeply it wrecked me
And how, if I cannot even comprehend this complete destruction, am I supposed to pick up the pieces?

Well obviously, I cannot be empty
I cannot simply learn to exist alongside the hollow hands that torture me
Oh
How their fingers curl into my chest cavity
Scraping my insides out
And they don’t give a **** what I do to end these violent crimes
They just sink inside of me deeper
And refuse to leave me here alone
Oh
How it aches like broken bones
And leaves a throbbing in my skull

When the nightmares begin to consume my body and soul, I begin to tear pieces of myself away, handing them out like tokens
At least then, I get to be the perpetrator.
The one in control of  repeating cycles of constant anxiety and perpetual uncertainty

I stand motionless and unseeing, breathless at his front door in the middle of the night
I memorize the curves of his mind and welcome the hollow hands to cut me into the perfect shapes to understand his perspective

Tirelessly, I bleed out for love that, somewhere in the back of my mind, I know barely feels good enough to waste my bandages on

I search for feeling like I am endlessly pursuing
I obsess over those who leave too many butterflies in my stomach, with wings beating so intensely I feel they are clawing up my neck and silently exploding out of my throat

The lingering belief that it is our privilege be a chapter in the book and never the hard earned happy ending
Comes from a smaller version of myself

She believes that we should be grateful to have breathed every ounce of our life into another until we could no longer feel the rise and fall of our lungs

She believes we are lucky to be destroyed over and over again
Then to never have loved in the first place

I can't help it when I look into his eyes

When he tells me that his mother's middle name was Theresa
That he loves the smell of the supermarket and snow
And that he doesn't like the taste of pickles
Because they're too sour for his tongue
When he tells me that he's never loved a woman like me before
I want to know everything he has tucked away under those sapphire stones