I used to dream about a place filled
with things that other people forgot to love
all cramped up in cages
all for sale.
I go to the cash register that is
accompanied by a gruff old man with
***** finger nails and ****** knuckles
and i ask how much it is to buy the whole store.
He asks me why, while glaring at
my cherry halter dress and reading my chapped pink lips.
He snaps that only people who
never had the capacity to love in the first place
could possibly run the store.
I tell him that i want to love them all
and that is all i ever wanted
even though I'm just realizing this now.
I place my neatly groomed hands on his grimy countertop and
I tell him that when i get a hold of this place
ill let them all out of the cages
and water the plant
and feed the dogs
hug the humans
dress up the dolls
and wear all the jewelry.
He replies with a swift punch to the counter top too close to my open palms that have just now reached to hold his hands
This noise causes all the babies to start crying
and i am thankful that my mother hated me enough to never have another child
I cautiously take my hands back
and tell him that i never had anyone to give love to
and that i have enough to go around now.
His face changes from a stone frown
slowly to an evil grin and he begins to approach me.
He grabs my thin boney wrists and forces me into a cage that has a wilted flower in it
the cage is right next to an old woman.
I scream and shake the cage and tell him i have enough love.
He shakes his head and says
not enough to save yourself.
I cry and look down and see a raggity ann doll.
She has makeup smeared all over her sewed on lips
and i vaguely remember doing the same thing to mine
before i lost it under my bed
and before i gave up trying to look for her.
I run my fingers through her hair
and cry because i know now how easy it is to forget.

And sometimes i wish that i could pull my teeth out and
feed them to your new girlfriend.
Because she doesn't like Good Will Hunting and
is afraid of lady bugs.
And god knows she needs some fangs
because she's mostly bark
and even when she does bite
its only soft gums that barely penetrate your skin
and i pity you for dating someone
who seems to take after my mother
and i wonder if maybe
i was born into the wrong life.

You are leaving me and i hate you
and the way your feet smell
and the way you never put the ice cream back.
I don't know what I'm going to do without you
I became accustomed to your ***** sock smell...i even like it now
and i enjoy my ice cream a little melted anyways

You are leaving me and i don't care
i can do better than you anyways
I bet you'll never find a girl who won't question your sexuality.
I don't know what I'm going to do without you
What if i never find anyone who can be my best friend while ******* me
you're definitely not gay. i don't know why i said that.

You are leaving me and i am crying
I didn't even love you
It wouldn't have worked anyways
I don't know what I'm going to do without you
i love you and it was supposed to be forever
*I love you and it isn't going to be forever

When you say let's get wasted
I'm sure that you don't mean
That you wanted to be a waste of space
A waste of energy
A waste of a perfectly good night.

I'm sure you don't know
That wasted could mean
To say words that cut up others insides
Like they swallowed the bottle
That is holding your poison.
You get the silky numbness and
they get the brutality of the oblivion

And you definitely don't know
Your son giving you CPR
As you collapsed right in front of him
In the middle of a poker game.
You were even sober.
And then you were dead.

You had wasted all your time
Wasting your chances to say I'm sorry.
Wasted your life being wasted

You can claim
That you were unaware
Of the disaster your body would create
Because mouths say what brains think
And hands touch what hearts want
And sometimes you feel like
You're being controlled
not by your soul
But by a group of ruthless
limbs and organs
That could be exchanged
when you die anyways.

Everyone will open their already satisfied arms
and welcome your starving body
as if they could feed you
without actually filling your body
with the intense affection you need.

They'll place their calloused hands
onto your soft ones that are directly attached
to your newly broken heart
and tell you that just because it hurts now
doesn't mean it'll hurt forever.
Tell that to your own hands mom.

I want someone to write about
Someone who will bend me over a gravestone
and make jokes about ******* the life out of me.

You feel guilty for wishing
he didn't love you as much as he does
It makes you feel like you're letting him rob you
of the ability to have problems with a relationship
to experience heartbreak
to experience unsolicited love.
He gives you nothing to write about
yet you can't tell him that because he hasn't done anything wrong
other than loving you the exact way a person would want to be loved.
In the times of experimenting you're promising him that
he is as beautiful of the stars
and he'll tell you you are as beautiful as the moon
except you want to be the sun.
The fiery hot mass of untouchable energy.
But how can you ask someone to love you less
so you can experience unneeded hurt.
It makes no sense
and is impossible to fix
because you don't want to be 30 someday
wishing that someone would love you the way he did

Dear you ignorant narcissistic fuxk boys,

I left my favorite bra in the backseat of your car...I know that i took one of all your matching socks, but its my favorite and makes me feel pretty like you never did.

Yesterday after i wore one of your old sweaters, I sat next to a girl in class who smelt like your deodorant. It must have ******* with her head cause i did too.

I forgot (maybe intentionally) to get rid of all your sticky notes that you used to leave in my wallet. Sometimes its nice to remember when we were in a beauty of a soon to be hurricane. It doesn't matter, you wanted a housewife anyways.

I used to fall asleep thinking about what pictures would line our fireplace. Our baby girl, our other baby girl, a family vacation, and a picture of us...with a crack in the glass right down the  middle of my face. Oh wait, thats what happened when you threw it at the wall behind my head.

Sometimes i want to tell you these things, but then i remember all i want is my bra back.

Praying with your hands tied together

Don't put other peoples feelings before your own for too long. You can act selfless sometimes, but not forever.
2. Don't debate whether you have a right to feel the way you do. Emotions aren't there to be questioned.
3. Stop saying i hate you as a result of spontaneous frustration. Because you don't hate them.
4. Let your heart embrace all the positivity it can. Try things, experience things, say yes if you have even one inkling of interest.
5. Cut out the negativity (go back to #1)
6. Eat healthy. Drink a glass of water before those Now or Laters. Then eat them.
7. Write more.
8. Learn to *** in public and no be uncomfortable. Everyone in there is there to ***, you aren't special.

He wanted a housewife not a hurricane*

He wanted to converse about how the liberals were eliminating the idea of evil.
He wanted to go on picnics in the afternoon at the beach.
He wanted to argue over things like finances and how to parent his children.
He wanted her biggest problem to be what color to paint the nursery
and what the most nutritious thing for dinner was.

She was the liberal. Everyone was born good, and those who acted evil had been in environments that poisoned their brains.
She wanted to go on picnics at night in the graveyards, and do satanic rituals to make deals with the devil.
She wanted to throw things, scream about things that she was passionate about.
She didn't want kids. She wanted to be chaotic.

Yet they fell in love anyways.

If we could love a type of untainted love
we would be alive forever.
But love and hate are bordering countries
and sometimes they wash-up on each others beaches.
We were created by love
So hate is what kills us.

Destruction of our own kind
toys at the comprehension abilities
that lack.
Those who can't understand
that
As we
diminish
demoralize
those who produce life
as we
******
oppress
half our countries history
to allow those who are threatened
by the ever forming modernization
we **** off our masses
we break our chance at reproduction
until there is no one left to control
but oneself.

You're on your way to college
And suddenly you're singing
along to all the songs that you
listened to when you were sad
in middle school.

“Ladies first”. He uses his theoretical masculinity
To duck his way out of everything. He crosses his legs and looks accusingly at her.
She stands and tells him that he reminded her wasted energy,
Of the tall glasses of apple juice,
Drunkenly tossed at the electrical outlet,
To get some type of “Zap”
Though she said it more like,
“Zzzaap” wiggling her fingers to try and show a current of energy.
She said it as if she didn’t really know,
What type of reaction she was looking for.
He is quiet until he isn’t.
She reminded him of a seconds old baby.
Blue because the reality of oxygen hadn’t touched her yet,
And he was still waiting for her to turn into a peachy color and embrace reality.
“Before we met, I hadn’t slept in my bed for weeks,
You couldn’t even get through a coffee date”.
Her eyes are fiery and she says something that a person with fiery eyes would say
“Before we met, I didn’t need to have ******* with people to feel intimacy”.
That is an explainable response.
Anyone would say that
So I guess that implies that everyone has fiery eyes.
He scoffs and begins to stand and she mimics him
“Don’t make me throw apple juice at you”
“I’m a broken outlet remember”
“I haven’t thrown apple juice at you yet, we don’t know that”
“It doesn’t matter. You can’t breathe with me around,
And I’m more of a margarita guy anyways”
He leaves
She cries
They both have fiery eyes.

Dress up in your Sunday best like god hasn’t seen you at your worst

Women washing their hair
Down the drain of lost cause and subpar advances
Strands cling to necks, to fingers, to *******.
You cling to hands, to shoulders, to waists
But just like the dead pieces of myself
You go down the drain.

I had always wanted to grow my hair long
So watching it spin around
With the suds from my shampoo
Was a little like saying goodbye to you.
I knew I wanted it to stay attached to my body
But that I needed to let it go so I could grow
Longer
Healthier hair.

So I lather it in conditioner and use a wide tooth comb
To get rid of all the left over pieces.
But even when I get rid of the dead hair
Its still stuck in my drain.

My future is probably all sprawled out on his girlfriends bed
Just like you’re sprawled out on mine
Both crossing their fingers for forever.

The smell of brains frying
nerves running short
teenage desperation
all mixed with lubricated hail marys
poisoned self medication
because we know best
and we best know
how to do it ourselves.

The failed attempts at self justification
cling to the lockers trying to remember
a time in the last 4 years that they took a breath.
Anxiety floods the student population
when they realize that the alcohol
can't drown the reality anymore.

If you though that having me wrapped around
your finger was something to be proud of
prepare to suffocate because i have nothing
else to hold onto and i am drowning.

His kisses were safe but never made me feel anything
Yours make me feel like i could fit our galaxy inside my body
but despite both
i want to be the one to make myself feel something

Freshman year we went camping for 3 days
I loved the scenery but hated staying there
i guess thats how you perceived me

Your head was so big that there wasn't even room for my body
In a place full of people i thought the most important person was you
In a car with the two of us, you also thought it was you.

The strobe lights are invading my sights
The smell of bodies creep into my nose
The room is shaking
but i feel nothing but you.

The type of silence that can't lie for anything, who everyone knows that something is itching to seep out of her mouth, yet it only seeps out her eyes and not everyone can read it.

The type of silent that is so loud that you can't ever understand the meaning. The type that refuses to say what they mean, and leaves you with a handful of tissue paper but no gift.

The type of silence that is love letters written on the backs of receipts, that you put up your sleeve. Why do you do that? You'll throw them out anyways.

She spent days building ice castles in the sun
He spent days trying to light fire to his house in the rain.
She drank coffee laced with poison to nurse her soul back to health
He took tablets of visions so he could hide from himself.
And when they met the fires thrived
the poison killed
and the visions overcame
and the ice castles turned
to puddles

The water coming from the shower head
is  cleansing
yet burning
and i put it all the way up
so that i can prepare myself for hell.

i wasn't prepared for an attempted killing.
I was wearing a low cut shirt that said "I ****** your girlfriend"
and even after assuring him that my clothing wasn't meant to mean anything, he tried to killed me anyways.
I was a little drunk
He came after me still.
I wasn't carrying  pepper spray.
I didn't make it clear to the criminal that i had feelings
that i wasn't consenting him to **** me.
It's logic isn't it?
Who consents for someone to try to **** them?

Now replace all forms of **** with ****.
i wasn't prepared for an attempted ****.
I was wearing a low cut shirt that said "I ****** your girlfriend"
and even after assuring him that my clothing wasn't meant to mean anything, he tried to **** me anyways.
I was a little drunk
I wasn't carrying  pepper spray.
I didn't make it clear to the criminal that i had feelings
that i wasn't consenting him to **** me.

2-8% of ****** go to jail.
Despite the mounds of evidence against them.
No one say someone was murdered because they "asked for it" or "knew the risks"
Why should i have to dictate my life over the fear of potentially being abused.

Does it scare you when you decide that you want to write poems for a living
Yet sometimes you can’t even finish a sentence.
When your ideas all come back to cliches
And ‘your whole heart’ wants to ‘learn to live with the intent to be alive’
But your brain just wants to quit and maybe move on to something easier
And less emotionally draining like physics.
Does it scare you when youve paid thousands of dollars to learn to do something
Everyone knows you cant teach.
and you still can’t finish your sentence.

Why did you keep your love letters hidden up inside your brain
We both know you were going to throw them out anyways.

Stuggling with something that is not yours to struggle with is difficult. The shortness of breath whenever I try to understand is uncalled for. The tightness in my stomach when I try to write about you is not mine, unexplainable. You did not try to **** me. You did not confide in me. You probably didn’t even think about me. But I think about you. I think about you in a jail cell. I think about you, thinking about what happened. I think things that make me bend over backwards, that make me swallow my tongue, that make me shake. To be truthful, I wonder more than I think. I wonder if you feel alone, I wonder if you even remember. I wonder if defending you is even worth it, because last thing I heard from the internet is that detachment disorder means you never cared about any of us. That it could’ve been me. I could’ve been killed. That you probably didn’t even think twice about it. I wonder if you’ll want me to write to you. I wonder if you’ll be upset that i’m going to your trial. I wonder why. Such a stupid question to answer an already unjustified feeling. Why. People loved you, people wanted to be around you, people wanted you to be happy. Why. You always used to talk to me, you listened you were sympathetic, you cared. Why. Thats what they do Emma, Thats why they’re sick because they know how to manipulate good people. Why. You aren’t bad, you aren’t crazy, you’re hurt,  and you’re alone. Why. I have dreams about you, that you’ve come back, that there was a mistake. Why do I miss you, it probably could’ve been me.

“I want that one” I exclaim pointing to the unicorn on the bottom shelf. I choose this one because she seems sad because all she’s ever seen was peoples feet. I pick her because maybe no one else will buy her because she’s at the bottom shelf and taller people wont even see her. She is soft and white and has cotton candy pink horns, hooves and bows around her neck.
“It looks cross-eyed” my brother Charlie observes in a critical way that night at dinner. He’s just upset that he didn’t get to pick anything because it isn’t his birthday. It doesn’t matter though, the new member of my stuffed animal collection is named Sparkles, and nothing anyone says will change that she is my new best friend.
After dinner everyone goes to walk the dog and I bring Sparkles, because it would be silly to leave her home by herself. We drive down the road and pretend to have tea on the beach. To my happiness, everyone sits in a circle. Sipping on tea and complimenting each other on clothes we aren’t wearing, food we aren’t eating and things we didn’t do, I’m surprised that even Charlie is partaking. The sun begins to set and we begin to pack up, or rather my Mother and Father pack up while Charlie holds Sparkles by the scruff of her neck and threatens to throw her in the bushes.
“Sparkles is gonna get lost Em, too bad you cant catch me” he cries running towards the thick brambles.
“Stop it! Stop! You’re hurting her!” I screech after him, desperatly trying to overcome his head start. But i’m too late. By the time I get to him he is already preparing to throw her into the prickers.
“NO!” I yell as I watch Sparkles get launched into the 8 foot tall bush of thorns.
I shove Charlie into the bush, which results in cuts all up his arms and back.
“Emma,what are you doing?!” my parents exclaim coming at the sound of Charlies cries.
“He threw Sparkles”
“Thats never an excuse for pushing” they scold.
“But..Spark”
“No Emma, you should have thought of that, we have to go fix Charlie” im cut off
They don’t understand. Sparkles made it so that everyone drank tea together, and stood for the small things to be noticed. She was my best friend, we were both small things standing up to big people. Of course they don’t understand. Big people don’t know about small people problems, they only know about fixing what has been broken. I want to rewind to when we all were talking about the fantasies of castles and secret twin siblings, where we were all small people for a minute.

You were there to either be saved
Or to be made an example of.
You were between too much pressure
or insanity.
You were old enough to know better
but young enough to fail to meet your own needs.
You were stable enough to pretend to be content
but sick enough to try to commit ******.
You knew me long enough to tell me most things
but different enough to not tell me anything.
I love you enough to visit you in prison
but am stupid enough to be scared of you.

One day i woke up
and we no longer spoke the same language
that we had been speaking yesterday.
Always wasn't in my vocabulary
yet it had been replaced with forever in yours.

To grow up means to exhale
All that you've inhaled as a child and to inhale adult mindsets.
Breathe out. I will grow into what in meant to be.
Breathe in. I will create myself into something of my choosing
Breathe out. I want something that has instant gratification
Breathe in. I want to be happy tomorrow too
Breathe out. I have to find someone that makes me better
Breathe in. *I will make myself better

its not okay, if its only okay for you

I don’t want to be touched in ways that make my insides turn to licorice
I don’t want you to hold my hand because it binds us to the public and you own me.
I don’t want to kiss in movie theaters.
I don’t want to have *** in the back of your car.
I dont like doing things that feel like a betrayal to myself
Every time our hands intertwine or our lips press together
In a half hearted attempt to rekindle the butterflies that are long gone
Sit at the bottom of my stomach. Dead.
When I fake *******, smiles, lies about how happy I am
I feel apart of myself tangle up
Making me smaller and smaller until im a ball of knots.
I don’t want to be anyones *** interest
Safety boat
Most important person because it limits me to what I can be to myself.
I don’t want to be touched in ways that betray myself and make me any less of my own most important person.

The problem is
People only see as far as the last sentence in the newspaper article.
They see that my best friend stabbed his father.
They see that he was planning it.
They see that he failed in his attempt to **** him.
They see that at 1:30 am he was arrested at the scene.
They see he will be tried as an adult for premeditated attempted ******.
They don't see anything else.

At our little brothers baseball games we would search for quarters to get airheads.
On the bus we would share stories about our latest failures.
He was trying to get sober.
He had failed to **** himself twice.
He had serious mental problems that everyone underestimated
He needed help.
He didn't get it.

He's alone in a juvenile detention center, isolated.
Mentally unstable and yet again without a support system.
Doomed for the rest of his life.

So excuse me when i tell you to shove it up your ***
When you say that i should stay away in fear of being remembered
Because all he'll do is remember you forgot him when he needed you most.

I will not ask you what youve buried
With the hands that you used to pull me out of the earth.
I shouldnt ask you what youve tried to pull from the sky
With the fingers that you used to reach me to the clouds
I wouldn’t ask you what you’ve kept silent
With the mouth that you used to convince me from the shadows
I couldn’t ask you what you’ve run away from
With the legs that ran towards me.
I wont ask you why you did
I wont ask you why you shouldve
I wont ask you why you wouldve
I wont ask you why couldve
And neither should you.

Someday when the birds learn how to mock our cries of scrutiny
You will gravitate away from the floor that is magnitized with your mistakes
Will you change your polar relevancy and float away in such a manner that you can hear the birds screech about trivial actions that somehow became your reputation.

Jealousy is how you say my name
To show distain
Regret
Resentment
But underneath
To show pride
To show that you still believe you can get me back
That I made a mistake
And that we were in love
Despite that it was just lust
Laced with pretty words
To justify our intentions
Of banging the living daylight out of each other
And it was you that made me feel like I had to justify myself
Because *** is something beautiful, and meaningful
Was something lovely and inatmite
Until you made it shameful.
You say my name to brag about how
You were in love with a girl who was ***** and impure
A girl who confused lust and love
A girl who got lost in your intentions
A girl who was not in love with you.

I dare you to reclaim yourself as human of the year
don’t be scared
You have won.
You are so inconceivably right.
I am, a matter of fact a piece of property
And I can’t thank you enough,
For making people ask for your permission
To touch me in ways that you never could.
Thank god I have you to set some boundaries
Cause god knows if I didn't
I might actually become...
Happy?
Thats silly because you make me happy
With your ability to set expectations
For me, made by you
Thank god none of them surpass
Your abilities because I may find out ...
I can do better?
So reclaim yourself as human of the year
Everyone always hates the phoenix
And I'm sure
That I hate you.

Next two years, college, poetry, poetry,
You, me, ***, condoms, birthcontrol?
Mother, permission, cleaning room, cleaning life, windex, lemon scented windex.
Windows, escape, Ani Difranco, 32 flavors, 32 flavors and then some
I am 32 flavors and then some.
My grades are 1 A, 2 Bs, 3 Cs and 2 Ds?
Atleast I vary. Colleges look for variation.
I can cross my eyes. Only one other person in my family can cross their eyes.
This was my last quarter to make an impression.
Impress. Smile. Eye contact. I have to meet your mother.
I have to go shopping
With your mother.
I lied to my mother
Mothers dont like lying
My parents asked me if something tragic happened to me
I used to wish that something tragic would happen to me
Nothing tragic has happened to me
Unless you call immense boredom with tiny people on a tiny state tragic
Which for a matter of fact I do.
You ask me whats going on
I’m a smart girl
Im flattered that you think so
But I doubt your surgeon parents will agree
How many AP classes am I taking...
0.
This is so out of character.
Youve never avoided your problems like this before
Silly parents
You’d avoid your problems too if they were
Life ambition, college, ***, condoms, birthcontrol?
1 A, 2 Bs, 3 Cs and 2 Ds, cleaning room, cleaning life
Cleaning out my character
Because I have to impress your mother.
Should we get you a therapist?
We shouldve gotten you a therapist last year
Dealing with stress is hard for anyone
You just need help.
I do not want your help.
Dealing with stress is not hard
Put your head in the sand and listen to Ani Difranco
32 Flavors
32 flavors and then some
I am 32 flavors and then some

Atoms are 99.99% empty space.
And that is the only thing keeping me from losing myself
In the thought that we never actually held hands
We never touched
We never kissed
We were never in contact.
Except I'm still left with
Your smell
Your thought
Your vision
Your .001 of matter that happened to touch the most important .001 of me.

I've been looking for a life boat in your eyes
Looking for an fire escape through your hands
So please refrain from trying to comfort me
When you tell me that the last life boat is gone
And the escape ladder has already been burned away.

Could you refrain from pointless text messages
that force me to politely respond
when all i want to do is pour out my thoughts
about how you really need to move on
because you've already been replaced with a boy who has more freckles than you do
and who doesn't have a constant need to be dominant.
Could you please stop smiling at me in the hallway like we are still friends
because we aren't and no matter what you convince yourself
you will never convince me that we were anything but an experiment
to see if two people could really spend the same day of every week
at the same time
doing the same thing
and fall in love within the limits
of our parents
and the answer is no its not possible
and you can't convince me that its love
despite how many times those 3 words escaped my mouth
i will not let myself believe that your everlasting need for competition
and my constant shrinking is what love is
and that the fact that whenever i see you i get irritated
is what happens when two people stop loving each other.
I don't believe that thats even possible
and if love is truly one person growing and the other shrinking
one falling in love even more and the other suffocating in resentment
then i want nothing to do with it.

Make sure she's tall but not taller than you.
Make sure he's opinionated but knows how to be quiet
Make sure she's invested in something, but not too much because thats just annoying.
She should be skinny but not boney
Curvy but not fat.
He should have a certain hair color but not dyed
Her Hair long but not frizzy
He's Kind but not passive
She's Smart but not smarter than you
Once high school began I realized that people are smallest between grades 9-12.
This is when you start letting other people crawl in the the gapping hole
Which is the negative space that used to be self confidence.
You stop being proud of your sailing bruises because people say that they look ugly on your legs
You stop dying your hair because people say they like natural
You start to nod at the ignorant things that enter your ears
And start to ask others if you have the right to be angry.
Taking up space begins to be a challenged you have to concentrate on
Because the galaxies that you were apart of before
Start to shrink to just a single planet.
Stop saying that you don’t, care when you do
And stop changing yourself for anyone other than your own two eyes
Stop accepting words that prove that they know you
And start asking people to talk to you like they love you.
Take in the people that love you because of your sneeze
And because that you take pride in your scars.
That will still want to play with your hair if its short and blue
Take the people that love you for things you can’t change.
Teach people that the difference between love and lust is friendship
That just because you call them your best friend doesn't mean you’ve friend zoned them.
That just because they can regurgitate facts about you, doesn't mean they care about you.
Dye your hair green
Cry because you succumbed to their wishes of straight hair and skimpy clothes
Leave them because they encouraged you to.
Deny the next persons demands
Take up space and don’t apologize for it.

They are tall. They have freckles. Their voice is presumably lower than yesterday. They make you laugh. They look at you when you speak. They answer your calls at 1am. They smell nice. Their smile, their hands, their vibrance can suddenly invade your conscious and you aren't really sure how they never did before.

We can kiss. We can kiss, and only be friends. And we can tell ourselves that it'll stay the same, because for a while, it will. We can continue to kiss, and continue to go on with our days like it doesn't effect us. But if we do proceed to let our lips touch, then someday it'll hit us. That things like this don't happen for fun, or because of physical attraction. They happen because somewhere along the lines, we decided in order to go on with our days, we needed those kisses. And the day they don't happen, will be the day that things change

Everything we do, has a consequence. So if you plan on wrapping me around your finger, you best prepare to lose circulation.

And now when we talk, my hands become alien things. Touching and pulling at things that are just fine where they are. My words become too big in my mouth, and tumble out whenever it opens. Maybe you should hear them, maybe you shouldn't