You find yourself alone
Maybe for the first time
Maybe you bump into loneliness like you would an old classmate at the grocery store
Maybe its the same as hearing a song on the radio that your mother used to sing to you before bed
New, yet familiar
Perhaps you were deserted by the one person you needed the most
Perhaps your love affair became a crime scene
Perhaps you are just now realizing that your rough edges do not, and never have, fit into the puzzle of this life
Either way, the weight of the thick fog of isolation is not leaving your chest

You have spent time in grey
In beige
In mundane
In stoic
In complacent.
You are familiar with apathy as if it were swimming in your own blood stream.
Not so much soulful, just soulless.
Waking up every morning to the promise of an entire world,
But even that couldn’t get you out of bed.

You do not feel poetic
You have no desire to create music
Nor writing
Nor art of any kind
You wish to simply sit very still
Until the lines of distinction between you and the rest of the world fade away
And you can dissolve into your background

Although you are eager to dispel this disease of desolation,
You must resist that urge to vanish
You have just been given the gift of solitude
And although you may feel like you have been vexed
Do not be mistaken!
There is no greater freedom than to be undefined

Learn to love the full tone of silence
Talk to yourself in the language you knew even before birth
-And then listen
You will unfold
Blossom
You will be created



Realize that your worth does not diminish when you are alone
You are no less intelligent
Or witty
Or beautiful
When there aren’t eyes or ears to witness you

If you begin to miss the danger of loving someone
Put your fingers to your neck and realize you have the power to stop your own breath
Put your fingers to your heart and realize that you are now inches away from the only thing keeping you alive
Realize, that that is pretty much the same as loving someone.

Learn to open yourself up
You are guts and bone and veins and they are not beige.
Learn to stand on your head
And as the earth becomes heavenly and the heavens keep you grounded,
See that you are not static

Dig inside yourself and removed the rotting routine with your own two hands
Let it get stuck under your nails,
Make a nest in the creases of your knuckles
Look down and see
A map of apologetic survival
A map of quiet desperation
A map of a place you never want to see again
And then don’t see it
Ever ever again

Don’t think you’re less if you’re happy hanging with your breath
This life is not a test to see how many best
Friends you make in a day

You’re no less striking if you’ve taken a liking
To solitude, stop fighting, you don’t have to abide
To society’s way

If you’re happy in your head
than solitude is blessed and
being alone becomes ok

It’s only lonely when you tell yourself
You’re the only one
Who feels that way

Give respect to silence
Ya no man is an island
But that doesn’t mean we’re all the same

And it doesn’t mean that we’re not connected
Or that we aren’t affected
By the things that you say

But you might just be missing out
On what life’s all about
When you try and keep the loneliness at bay

You can find power
In each flower
But you don’t know the strength of the bouquet

Until you’ve become acquainted with the quiet
Until you’ve explored the highest
Form of your decay

It is only then, that you’ve strengthened
And toughened enough those rough edges
For the the loneliness to go away.

I knew the woman at the Shopper's Drug Mart had never had her heart broken when she kicked me out of the hair aisle for slathering shampoo onto my chest for I was hoping that the suds would seep into my skin and find their way to my heart.
The label on the bottle read "anti breakage" and I just couldn't resist a try.
It didn't work however.
Possibly because the skin that stretches across my rib cage is no longer flesh, but scar tissue.
Or maybe its because I see the world in metaphors.
I am a Chinese flower *** and my cracks are full of gold.
My heart is a quilt made of mix-matched fabric of flaws and failures crudely sewn together with good intentions.
I am the paradox of the bumblebee who hurts herself way more to sting than to stay.
But I am too complicated to me a metaphor.
I am a human, flawed and fabulous, still trying to find out why I'm here and too naive to see I'll never know.

"Everyone feels their emotions in a different way"
my mother had tried to explain this to me on many occasions but I never got it
It wasn't until I started loving you that I realized it wasn't so much a way, but a place
I feel everything in my chest
Like when I first knew I liked you
We were doing our chemistry homework and the smell of your skin blocked me from thinking
You told me, "I'm glad we met."
I felt an overwhelming sensation of
joy, excitement, nerves , potential, trepidation, wonder, and hope
I felt it rise to the bottom of my throat and gurgled like a stream right after the rains in May
Finally it overflowed into the eloquent and graceful words of
"oh ya.....****"

Or the first time you told me you loved me
I swallowed the words down into my chest where they bounced off each rib like a xylophone
Until I spat out the melody of
"Holy Crap, I love you too."
Sometimes when I close my eyes I can still feel them ringing

Or the last time we talked
When you said you didn't think you could give me the time you thought I deserved,
When I knew you were saying you didn't love me anymore
When you grabbed my ego by her black hair and slit her throat
Her blood dripped down my trachea and into my lungs
And I stood there drowning in my own murdered self confidence
Until I spewed out the blood soaked works "*******" onto your memory

And every night since then
I can feel my ribs caving in on themselves, puncturing my insides
The same ribs that were once the waterbed for my stream of emotion
The same ribs that used to be the keys of a xylophone
And I lie there and can breathe out nothing but the absence of you

There are really only three things you need in life
Firstly, your family, to teach you to be kind
Second, friends to share your wine
The third however, is harder to find
Someone to share your heart, body, soul, and mind
Of these things I have the easier two
But I lack the third in lacking you

I hum the tune of loneliness
I add the harmony of your absence
All to the beat of heartbreak
And I dance to it all night

The books my mother read to me
In the dim lamplight while I fought
Against the weight of my eyelids
Taught me that I was to be saved, so I waited.
But my prince never came.

I set off on my own journey.
I got dirtied, bruised, and burnt.
I met ogres, fought dragons and battled witches.
Finally, I arrived to find you
Using the last of my strength
I reached up to knock on the high walls of your heart
"Open to me!" I said

But you stayed behind your doors
And peered at me through the cracks
My hair was a mess and my dress was torn
And you threw me out of your castle
For I looked nothing like any princess you had seen before
You could not see that it had been all for you.

Sometimes I can feel nothing at all
Except the time washing over me
Taunting me with its assurance
Taunting me with its infinity
Making a fool of me
And I find it strange
To be anything at all.

You crept into the fissures of my brain
And you tidied the dustiest corners of my mind.
You got through the cracks of my fears,
Around the rifts in my trepidations
And on top of my deepest enigmas.
You reached down into the crevices of my doubts
And relieved me of their burdens.
But since you've left
I have started to gather dust again.
My crevices have started to fill up
And again I am weighted down with their might.

If you dusted my heart for fingerprints
You'd find they're all yours
If you searched my whole body for clues
You'd find the imprint of your hands on my hips
The scent of your skin in my lungs
The sound of your voice in my ears
You'd find the reflection of your eyes in mine
The warmth of your body still in my mind
And the folds of your skin under my nails

I tried to write a poem about love
But I just wrote your name
Over and over and over again.
Because that's what it is to me
Your handwriting
Your smell
The gap between your teeth

The world gives
And the world takes
The world breaks
And the world creates
Of this we were given you
Of this you were taken too

You're like a cold cup of coffee
Or a bouquet of wilted flowers
Perhaps a rusted bike
Someone once cared about you-
Until you were forgotten

Until your milk was separated
Your petals had drooped
Your wheels no longer turned
The absence of love is evident in your entire being.

They say "forget him"
But I can't
Because while he thought he was stroking my hair
He was really smoothing out the wrinkles in my soul
When he whispered in my ear
It got carved into my skull
And when he touched the most hidden parts of my body
He got access to the hidden parts of my being
How simple it would have been to just give him my skin
It can be mended with stitches and a band-aid
But I gave him my entirety
And only time can heal that

I used to draw my life story in sharpie on your hands
My past, my doubts, my fears.
I would trace over and over the lines
In hopes that the ink would seep into your bloodstream
And make its way to your heart
And you'd understand