You tried to count me in cups of coffee on Sunday Mornings
With each smile you added another spoonful of sugar
Every brush of my foot past your leg,
Another cream
But soon I turned into hard whisky
Straight out of the bottle on a Tuesday night
My stale, aged words stinging the tip of your tongue
Burning the back of your throat
Slowly warming you from the inside
Turns out I was never your cup of tea

Books and stories promised me a lot more
Than I ever got from you
With every page turned,
Another pledge was fed
To my youthful tongue.
You were supposed to decide
If my prince charming
Was really a prince
Or charming at all.
You were supposed to see past my mistakes
And supply wisdom to surpass them.
You were supposed to hold me so tight
That I would be reminded
Your heart,
Is also mine.

I was a child.
I believed that you could do no wrong.
But all you ever did was wrong.
You marked me with your words
Bruised me with your touch
Made me believe that I,
Was not worthy of your wisdom
That you sat high on a golden throne,
While I shined the steps,
That rose you up higher.

Strenuous years of wishing and waiting
Finally amounted
To a girl
Becoming a women
And realizing,
Books and stories promised me a lot more
But I could be a better writer

I was never meant to fall in love with you.
Love lives in books,
And on billboards.
Love is loud.
Love is unkind.
You made love pick me up at my door,
While being pulled by four white horses.
You made love beautiful,
And caring
Tangled, but easily unraveled.
Love was not something I was supposed to experience,
At least,
Not with you.
You see,
I am missing more pieces than I ever even started with,
And it hurts to know that you would forever be
Picking up after me,
Carefully trying to put them back where they belong.
As I gracefully dance off the cliff of cliche,
I'm going to say to you,
You're much too good for me.
I was never meant to fall in love with you
Love lives in books,
And on billboards,
And in you.

We break things that have not been broken
Because we believe that everything broken
Goes back together
Human beings are a thing of carelessness
We throw things that shine up into the air
Just to watch it linger and catch the sunlight
Then in crashes and shatters
Gracefully slicing our skin into perfect lines of symmetrical irresponsibility
It's just enough pain to make us hurt
Hurt enough to realize our mistakes
But the scars aren't deep enough to remind us
For the time to come
Because one day the sun will be shining bright
And we'll hold that pretty glass structure of
Hope and happiness,
Completion, complexity,
Danger, dignity,
Strength and solitude
And we'll throw it up into the air
Just to watch it shine
Even when it shines just a bright in our own two hands

He's the kind of person who looks into somebody else's eyes and only sees the reflection of himself.
It's like opening a beautifully written book,
And then washing out all the words.
Just so you can fill the pages,
With your own.

There
There is where it sits
Something like a picture
But pictures do not hurt
Maybe like a fire
Without the heat and light
It casts a shadow but has no form
It sings a beautiful song with no voice
"Oh Darling", it whispers
But it is not there
The sound never reached the air
But I heard it
"I hear you"
I call
I'm shouting to nothing
"That is good. It seems nowadays I am nowhere at all."
"The others said I'm crazy."
It laughs and sighs
"They always will crush what they don't want to realize."
"They said you are not here."
More noise from nothing
But the picture became brighter
The flame grew like wildfire
The shadow became larger
The song was now louder
The colors and sounds
Swirled in my head
A booming voice from the empty corner said
I am alive and I am here
Hope is what you see
And hope is what you hear

We're all expected to be perfect in this imperfect world
Perfection is shoved down our throats
Into our lungs until all we can do is inhale it into the walls and then
Breathe it out.
Out into the atmosphere of insecurity and illusion
For others to helplessly breathe in
It encases our words
Lacing them with a sort of silence that demands to be heard
Like the dark you begin to see it
Then at once it becomes your aphotic solitude
You don't know how to turn the light back on
You're forgetting what your skin looks like
All you can do is rely on your touch to feel who you are and what you've become
Words spoken into the black are what you react to
Plainly following the sound like a child
Hoping that words that taste as sweet as the rain
Bring you back to the surface of yourself
The self that others told you to hide away
The self others told you was wrong
In your darkness you find that you are also an ocean
Dark and looming
Absorbent of the sun
Home to beautiful things that people fear
Consistently lapping at the shore
Hoping one day you'll get closer to the land you desire
What you don't realize is that your darkness is others light
Your ocean is where the land dwellers so desire
You may be dark, you may be scary
You may be imperfect
But that doesn't mean you're alone

They say that man is not immortal
I beg to differ
For it is the living that keeps man
Forever
Legacies and words stay longer than life
And when passed down through time and minds alike
That is immortality
Man's own personal
Immortality

I love you as much as the ocean loves the shore.
I always come back, never expecting more.
Driven by the moon, an everlasting routine.
Thirsting for some form of serene.
I'm only saying this because it's a force of nature.
And I like to believe that you aren't that kind that would denature
I'll believe anything to convince myself that I would never purposely do this.
Something among this oceanic abyss.

So go and find the things that make you feel free

Go and find the things that make you feel alive

Maybe it’s not a whole new path

But the pretty things on the sidelines

I never knew that a person
Could be a prison.
That their words would be bars,
Trapping me inside of their indignation.
I never knew that a person
Could be a prison.
At least,
Not until I met you.

We write about things that hurt us
Because scars last much longer
Than the echo of laughter

I want to run.
I want to see the dust hover between my feet and the earth as I glide over everything that matters in life.
I want my hands to catch every star in the sky and re-paint them all over the mountains.
I want the breeze to tie my hair in knots like grass dancing with its neighbors in a hurricane.
The air I breath being fresh,
rolling in my lungs like the tide.
I will take the road less traveled by.
I will dance in the darkness with the trees as my audience.
The rustle of the leaves will be my music with no tune.
I will watch the sun advance from the horizon and brighten the world, absorbing every bit of darkness.
I want to take a leap of faith, but build my wings on the way down with whatever falls with me.
I want to be lost,
but found in myself.
I want to wake up but still be in a dream.
I want to be fearless.
The monsters will never chase me again.
Their shadows won’t lurk in on the sidelines.
I will swim along the bottom of every lake,
looking up at the sun dancing across the ripples of water.
I will be the lion at the top of the mountain,
the breeze blowing my mane in my eyes,
I shall not fear.
I am the king of the jungle.
All because I want to run.
I want to run,
but where?
Where is everything that I yearn for?
I want to run
so I will
I will run with no directions
no maps
no worries
I will run.

Erin Holston---June 2014

We are all so eager to be defined
By tiny variables that admit to nothing
This is reality
And in reality there is nothing great enough to define you as a human being
No collection of words formed into a logical sentence will ever amount to defining
You
They can say that
You are like the breeze that becomes strong enough to move the trees
You are the sugar in lemonade on a hot summers day
You are the deepest part of the ocean
But really the simplest sentence that contains the largest multitudes
Is as close as you'll ever get
You are the atmosphere
The stars
Reality
You are reality