how can you say nothing
in so many words

i used to yell at you for
littering my collarbone with empty words
my neck with love-bites
but i'm the same, love,
if not worse

because i think i'm better
in that i've never held a heart like you have
and beat it to a pulp
but we are made of the same flesh
and ugly in the same ways

my flesh clinging onto my bones
begging not to let my heart fall out
and wanting you to touch it all the same
maybe i could be the type to dig through skin
and find your heart, desperate to keep beating

i can break you just as easily,
if only you let me;

self-destructive chaos ensues:
the sinuous arch of her back,
the thrill of seedy stalls.
empty words, empty stomach,
on which i drink gasoline.

i drink gasoline.
it tastes bitter,
it tastes like her.
i chug gasoline.

burn my lungs,
fry my brain,
but fill my heart, alas.

months after i last saw you
i still remember wanting to kiss you,
finding my face inches away from yours
and swaying with indecision

i remember thinking you were the most beautiful boy to grace the earth,
to ever hold me close while i kissed him

it's been months since i last wanted to kiss you
with that desperate kind of need
but the residue of that feeling lives in my insides;
when i see your face, smiling and innocent,
i remember you were a delicate boy i wanted to kiss;
it is only a fraction of the feeling, but still it consumes me
just as it had before

how have you been?
are you doing better than you were when we last spoke?
our time spent together was sweet and naive in its innocence,
but not without its flaws;
i remember we alternated between wanting to hold each other,
and holding other people;
sometimes wanting nothing more than to be kissed,
other times begging for the distinct sharpness of a knife across our skin

still, i neglect the bad memories,
or rather embrace them for what they were;
you were a beautiful, broken boy
i may have fallen in love a bit too much with your frayed edges,
loved you more when you were worse for the wear,
but i loved you wholly for who you were

it still makes me feel warm thinking of your arms around my waist,
hand on my hip,
pulling me close,
of our silly chit chat well past midnight,
making my heart feel lighter;
these are beautiful and fragile memories that i don’t want to forget,
as much as you may have hurt me once upon a time

this love is dead,
but it is no longer soaked in pain and bitterness;
i am so much happier having had you in my life,
and having been the person to make you smile at some point
that will always be beautiful and wholesome,
no matter what happens in between.

your scents make you

like a sweater laden with the aroma baked cookies,
and the faint hint of your friend's cologne
it is a comfort, hanging on your shoulders

or a sweet girl's perfume
that smells of chamomile and honey
her naive innocence
it is rich, the way it invades your nose

the boy you love
who smells like warmth if it could be bottled up
sweet and sour at the same time,
some drugstore body spray he uses
and yet it reminds you of evenings spent with him,
clinging onto your clothes,
or when some stranger wearing it walks past

even your own smell
beneath this manufactured, manicured
version of you,
is not lost on his skin
or his bedsheets

like the vanilla you used to lather on your skin,
mature and yet demure in its subtle sweetness;
still, your skin tasted of sweat and lust and
you

tell me, what do you smell like?
the clothes that sit in a laundry basket
for a few days,
the candle that burns in your room

i don't know

ask your friends;
they tell you it's a spicy scent;
a medical undertone;
it doesn't even stand out;

here you are,
defining the tang of a boy’s sweat
and what does yours mean to anyone?
nothings, perhaps

and it doesn’t sit well with you;
so you stand in aisles of perfume,
a crowded, over-priced store,
deciding who you want to be

the comforting cookies,
the innocent cup of tea,
it doesn’t even matter
you buy the prettiest bottle,
in lotions, in perfumes, in shower gels
a signature smell, you tell yourself,
maybe will make you make sense

you drench your skin in it for weeks
but you lose the lotion,
you forget to spray the perfume on in the morning,
run out and can’t find the same scent anymore

you borrow your beautiful friend’s perfume for a day
and it reminds you of her
the soft angles of her smile, her mermaid hair
you feel pretty

then it wears off when you get home
and you’re left with
medical, spicy nothing; what does that even mean?

what does it mean
to not know what your own body smells like?
to only have others' smells cling to you
is both a privilege and a hindrance

i am marked by lovers and friends
i have patches of skin that smell like certain boys
but does that not make the skin theirs?

your scent makes you, but i don’t have one.

i miss the way he made my heart feel full
because even when it hurt the weight made me feel like i was worth something
and there was his beautiful smile always on the tip of my tongue
but tangled in his harsh words

and i loved the isolated idea of him sitting alone at home
when my mind distanced his loud laugh from the sadness hidden in an open field
my breath would get caught in my chest and i felt so light
he's just like me
but prettier and softer round the edges

and there is a sad song he once showed me that i can't stop playing
because i miss him and his hands
and the way he held me against the sun
against his chest and i felt
like i was dying because i have so much love for him
and there is not enough light in me to tell him that

he's written in so many of my poems
that i couldn't keep inside and couldn't change
to look prettier
because he was an unfiltered poem that
could always make me cry
and now i can barely write and everything
is caught in my chest

when you fall in love with a boy who says things because they sound right
it gets hard separating your love for him
and your obsession with an idea of who he could be
if he could just love you

and my words stopped having the same beautiful
rhyme when we stopped talking
i wrote this mess of a poem for all your confusing sides
to make sense of you
so do i still love you?

i found solace in your arms,
and peace in your voice,
in your smile, always in my dreams,
like i can't get enough of it already

i want to close shop
and tell all the past me's there are that;
this is it.
i want to rewrite every poem where i tell myself i was in love,
because nothing compares to the subtle yearning of my heart for your skin
whenever you're not around;
i am no longer in the business
of manufacturing pretty greeting-card words,
because nothing i say captures
how much i love you;
the word love alone is not strong enough.

i find myself in a blissful bubble when i'm with you,
where there is only laughter and warmth;
where you come in different flavors
but they fill me up all the same

you are sweet when we're laughing too loud in your room,
velvety and understated when i am scrubbing your chest in the shower,
clean and refreshing when you wipe my tears off my face.

but i am painfully attached to you
no matter what packaging you come in;
you are a boy whose soul is kindred and kind,
and i would love you if i had nothing that made me;
you and your arms are enough.

you are always a word
colour-coded love on my page
a story i don't know how to write.

and i always try to because
the pain caught in my throat
has always weighed me down

and it
doesn't matter anymore that the words don't make sense
because when they are on the page
and i am bleeding
you are out of my system;

but i always find another word.

you talk about ***
like it is tasteful,
your fingers ghosting the inside of my thighs
like it is pure,
but it is not.

you leave a trail of gunpowder,
hide explosives in the crevices of my skin,
and there is nothing tasteful
in the hunger with which you do so,
like you are both in a rush to bruise my neck
and get rid of me after.

there is nothing tasteful about the noises i make,
loud and empty to fill up this loveless space.
do not confuse these sounds
with approval;
with every ****** of your hips,
i am further disjointed from reality.
is that really me, the girl moaning like she is made of lust?

perhaps that noise,
your nails digging into my back,
my knuckles turning white as i hold onto your bed frame,
are the only things keeping me grounded

because i try not to get lost in your kisses
when you only kiss me as a prelude
to ******* me,
and i try to forget that there is a timer
on my free range of your body

still, i let you hold me down,
and i let you kiss me
but there is nothing tasteful about the way you look at me once you are done

i am not ****
but your eyes turn lazy and glaze over me
before moving onto more important things,
and there is
nothing tasteful about the way you strip my confidence

you think i am your masterpiece,
but this is a violent crime against my heart;
your *** is empty
and i don't want it anymore.

the sun rises all the same
and eventually gives way to the moon
but i am emptier than a sandbox
filled with abandoned toys and memories

when there are no longer colourful crayons and words
for me to put my sadness into picture books
to be understood

even the poems tucked beneath my tongue suffer
because i try to bleed
but all that comes out is grey
and i am far more concerned with the awful poems
than i am with my colourless blood

this hollowness is the type
which typically accompanies sundown
when there is not enough light surrounding me
to compensate for whatever is eating away at my insides

this hollowness
usually disappears after a shower
and sleep
but the residue of which can hang onto my gut
persistently reminding me

i've never had love that felt safe
in which the world held its breath
and righted itself

not even when i'd sat next to a girl i pretended i loved
who wrote me poems
and smiled at me in all the right ways
and hurt me so poetically, i could never blame her

even she could not get me drunk enough
melting and compliant
to feel like we fit together well

though i've spent a great number of my days
sitting alone in bed wishing she was next to me
i know her laughter is not as infectious as i want to believe
and i want her to kiss my apathy away
trail her fingers and replace my skin with fire
but she could only make my bones
feel too large, skin too tight

still, i want her to kiss me
so i drink enough that my eyes slide shut
and she's so much prettier
and i let her hold me;
force my body to melt and fit against hers
until i can kiss her;

nowadays sadness feels a lot like excitement, like my mind trying to get a rise out of my heart. like i can prove i'm a human, and i swear i breathe the same oxygen as you, and when i get cut i bleed all the same.

i don't know if i'm scared of you, or riveted by the idea of you disassembling me, only to find out that it's all a petty act, and i'm gray. i don't know if i want to break you or be broken by you.

either way i'm sick, right?

an indistinct pang of guilt
when i hear birds chirping in the sun
and they sound nothing like the ones back home
and yet everything about them reminds me
of home

unbeknownst to these birds,
their chatter carries me across a continent
and across a sea
to a home where there are pocket sized versions of my family and i
where my grandmother is busying herself in the kitchen
and my uncle fiddles with the tiny TV facing the living room
filled with a cast of colorful characters
much brighter than anything this TV could give us

unbeknownst to these birds,
they carry me to a sand filled tent
where a single ray of sunlight enters from a gap in the entrance
and illuminates the book in my hands
and outside, their chatter creates a beautiful symphony
punctuated by the crash of waves on the shore
unbeknownst to these birds,
they warm my heart far more than any sun could

i hate these birds
the ones in my plastic backyard, outside my plastic house
guilting me into remembering;
this is not a home,
this is not my home.

i think
i love you

is the type of text i am tempted to send at four am
when we are in a purgatory of affectionate words
and the whole world sits still
holding its breath because every word you type is made beautiful
because of its very nature as a word that crossed your mind

i think
i love you

when you have exhausted every possible way there is to tell me about your childhood
and i don't care that you told me this story before
these are tokens of affection i greedily keep to myself
i wish i could hear your voice when you tell me these things
because i haven't heard it so long and i'm becoming tone deaf to anything that isn't you

i think
i love you

and potentially this isn't the type of thing i should want to say
to someone who is my friend,
to whom i say love only in the context of enjoying their company
potentially we shouldn't be talking well past midnight
when i am far more prone to slip-ups and confessions

you asked me
about my stories too
like you would gladly listen to me tell you
about the time i cut my thigh on the edge of the sink
or the first time a boy put his hands on me
and it felt like they were eating away at my skin

and i love you
because i know you have hands made of silk
and because you are blissfully unaware of how soft you are
and i love you because often you ask me why someone would

potentially
i am okay with the fact that i could accidentally tell you i love you

i would gladly tell you
i love you because of the way you hold yourself
and know your place in your world
in my heart
because there are anxieties chewing away at my brain
that i can ignore, or even stop, with the guidance of your words

and i love you because you will always ask me how i'm doing
and because you will talk to me for as long as you can
just because you’re halfway across the continent and i miss you;

i think
i love you

a party joke:
and my sobriety is the punchline.

i walk into the room because i'd just been bleeding and i want to forget. at the price of a reputation, or any innocence, i walk in knowing that i'm drinking to escape myself. everyone else knows the birthday boy also wants me drunk.

my sobriety is the punchline, but i can’t even remember the joke.

the night of my birthday
i had an epiphany
while a boy was trying to ***** me
underneath the table

while i was surrounded by everyone
i didn’t even know
and maybe memories seem fuller
in my sober head but i thought

i’d rather slit my wrists and
lose the scars
than share oxygen with anyone here

occasionally i’d say
my problem isn’t that i don’t have friends
but that i can’t make friends

and maybe i don’t want to know people
and retell their stories like a signature
but let my stories be known
residing in some other soul

i looked at his smile
and i hated myself because
still i don’t know if he makes me happy
or if i’ve fallen in love with the idea of
who he could be if he could just
love me for more than my skin

i’d love to find the perfect metaphor for him
because he is an ever-changing
open-ended question i’ll
never be able to answer

last week
he was a song stuck in my head and
i loved the idea of being obsessed with
all his verses but i was terrified
because i always got sick of songs i loved

yesterday
he was a hazy memory buried underneath
furtive glances and stolen kisses
and it used to be enough knowing that
he’d love to break me over any other girl

but when i’ve felt the clear screen
between me and everybody else
i thought for a second he loved me
despite my broken skin
and it’s not enough

and distancing myself from my mind
has never seemed to work because lately
loneliness has been a recurring theme and
one thing that keeps me company
is the idea that
one day i'll think of you
and feel okay

i don't know if i will be okay
but i hope you won't be the one holding my hand
and writing my story for me
i hope i’ll be okay

there is no honesty in my tears

when my brow is furrowed and my lower lip trembles,
i am trying to tell you

there is a whole war inside my head.

but no matter how much i know
that stab wounds hurt,

the blood is never real.

i am giving him the tools to dismantle me,

and i can’t

stop letting him hurt me.

most of the time i'm sick to my stomach
with the thought that you'd be better off without me;

poison love,
how you've invaded my body
and marked the inside of its skin,
the space between my organs,
the blood running through me

it has started to paralyze me,
poison love,
but there is an edge to that toxicity
that i am continuously falling for

or is it you i am loving?
the line separating the two has begun to blur
because your hands on me
have become synonymous with hurt

and i love it
but still i am scared you will leave me;
poison love, i know i am simple
i am bland and unlovable
but i need you to breathe

i need you

most of the time i'm sick to my stomach
with the thought that you'd be better off without me;
maybe that's exactly the kind of thought i need
to stop feeling so sick.