of all creation who breathes it is you robbing me of my lungs' ability,
the electricity of your presence shocks
me into memories. they pull on my coat
because it is cold in my own heart unlike your
fingertips melting the ice of my first impressions. part of me
resides in your throat and I wait on you to swallow me yet. I am
nothing if not a reflection in your irises.
violence of dawn is enough to redirect me to your voice for discouragement. I was never
taught that this fear could keep me safe from fears.
you hold your own tongue and you land on both your feet and
I am still stumbling to regain balance. a beggar might ask me for some change and I will
rid myself of you this time. yesterday you said goodnight
and it is dark as night until you say goodmorning and
I seem to wait for the sun to rise with your chest. this was not supposed to happen
you were supposed to flood the garden now the flowers are blooming.

Lock yourself in your room. Don't speak to anyone for the entire day. Read every book on your bookshelf, get lost in the stories and forget about what is eating your heart. Wrap yourself in blankets and force yourself to fall asleep. When the nightmares wake you, hide in the closet, hide under the bed. Your mind is the monster, your life is the nightmare, put them in their place. When they grace their cold fingers across the skin of your cheek, lean into their touch. Accept their arms around you and fall asleep to the sound of your own screams.
2. Look at yourself in the mirror. Take off all your clothes. Poke at every unseemly bulge and birthmark until you are huddled in a corner clutching your knees to your chest, trying to convince yourself that you are trapped somewhere inside this thing they call your body. Then, cry, that's all you can do in this moment.
3. Let your mind run wild. Hate yourself for thinking that and that and that. Listen as your thoughts tiptoe around in your head, and cross your fingers when your conscience hears the echo of her footsteps in the hidden basement when she steps on the secret door. That is where you locked away everything too difficult to express and every haunting thing you swallowed whole. Squeeze your eyes shut when she pulls back the rug and rips open the latch.
4. Curse your mother. Blame her when the sun will not set the way you wish it would. Call her names when you find yourself wanting to be anywhere else, anyone else. Pack your bags with everything you'll ever need. When you reach for hope, don't find it, and want to fall into her arms, open the door. Walk in circles. Wait until the feeling passes. When it does, empty the bag.
5. When the weight is too heavy to carry, invest in love. Open your darkest closets. Set forth all your demons upon the brightest light to have reached your dark core. When he collapses under its heavy force, question your own strength. He will leave you, and you will envy him. You will still be trapped inside.
6. Bruise your knuckles on the wall. Scratch at your legs until they bleed. Rip out your hair. Chew the skin off of your lips. Send tar into your lungs. ****** your liver and then your brain cells. Destroy yourself. When you can't recognize yourself in the mirror anymore, run. Don't bother putting on shoes. Run away from your reflection. Don't stop until you don't know where you are. Scream. Scream as if somebody will hear you, they won't. Scream as if somebody will save you, they won't. Watch the sunset. Walk home in the dark.
7. Don't trust his forevers. When he tries make this promise to you, hit him. Yell at him. Call him a liar. When he tries to explain, put your hand over his mouth. When he tries to apologize, do not forgive him. Let him make love to you, accept his apology when his fingers stain your skin purple and blue, forgive him for the names he calls you, believe you deserve it when he walks away. But never, ever, forgive him for promising to spend forever with you.
8. Learn how to play the guitar, the piano, the bass, perfect your singing. Cry songs out as if you feel these lyrics. Believe this is your outlet. Convince yourself it's helping. Write music about him. Write music about all of them, not your lovers, the ghosts. Serenade them.
9. Quit when you only hear his voice in the notes. Smash the instruments. Decide that you were never really better. Close the door. Stay in bed for a day. Two days. Four days. Only get up to have a smoke, to grab the blade, to use the toilet.
10. Fall in love with silence. Say the unutterable words. Make sentences out of your wounds. Create stanzas with your soul. Whisper the final works in the dark. These aren't your words. This is the work of whoever you were before. When the words fall from your lips with ease, the process is complete. She is gone. These are the final pieces of her. Soon enough you'll be empty of these too.

You played piano almost as well as you played with my heartstrings.
You live with excitement nobody can echo with a voice
stronger than yours. I was following my heart, as you had
directed me to do. I found myself at your doorstep. You always claimed I'd be the last
person you'd turn away. I can be strong for the both of us and go, but I know
someday I'll find myself wandering back to the light at the end of your drive. I hope
you won't let me in. You were never one to invite strangers inside.
If we meet again, will I have the chance to introduce myself as
someone other than your killer? Murdering you
in my own attempt to destroy myself was never my intention. Speaking to
your back was the only easy way to say "I love you".
I hope you always turn around when you're headed my direction. I hope
you always stay the same. I hope you never forgive me.

With you, I race through underbrush, running from warnings that you only contradict with kisses up my thigh and phrases like "it's different with you"
With you, I stare at the North Star, looking up for something I can't see but feel lying next to me, holding my hand and whispering false hope in my ear. Telling me to look just a little bit harder.
With you, I listen for a heartbeat from a heart that has already gone still, and only hear your blood freeze over from our Minnesotan winter. I wonder how you managed to convince me that you keep me warm through the cold nights.
With you, I have ventured through my own train of thought and discovered that you persuaded me to give more of myself after I've bled myself dry for you.
With you, I have lost myself, I neglected my beliefs somewhere along your collarbones as I allowed you not only to **** me, but to change me into something I wasn't for your own peace of mind.
With you, I have abandoned my words, left them banging on your eardrums and teasing your lips into a pity smile. Thinking they would make the difference, that, maybe, if I wrote you poems about the sun shining through your soul that it wouldn't burn my skin anymore.  
With you, I felt alive, when really all I was feeling was the slow satisfaction of dying the way I wanted to. The way I chose to. You may choose your poison, but has your poison, in fact, always known what you were to decide?
With you, I believed in love, as if it could save me from the world. As if you could save me. But you took that love and you redefined it with anger and control.
With you, I didn't believe in my love of words, that I use now, to tell you that I believe again. I believe that you wronged me out of spite for past lovers that took your heart and drowned it in one of ten thousand lakes. I believe that love is kissing in high and low places and always stopping to smell the roses, but love is not throwing shoes on the porch or blaming each other for our own acts of selfishness. Love is not the only thing to live for.
With you, love was my drug of choice and a slow walk through the cemetery, but now love is my sky and you are just another lost soul eventually to be buried 6 feet under.

morning is the sun flooding through my window
night is when you're flooding through my door
like an unforgiving force
I would gladly drown in
you are the storm of all my secrets
you are not regretted
but are the embodiment of my regret
pounding on the walls
begging to be freed and known by all the next lovers hands to touch me
you are the drivel that pours out of my crevices and imprisons the glare of every stranger
I wear you on my skin like a blanket
you are my comfort and you are crushing me
you are my reflection and the light that leaves spots in my vision
you are the moments in between every wound I inflict upon myself
you are every inch of despised color dripping down my thigh
I break promises like you break hearts
but we both can't seem to stop
so wash me down with my despair
and we can pretend this is the last time we have to empty out our pockets before one other

The sound of your
snoring exists only in my walls today.
I swear you live there and whisper
now and again to remind me
where and how you are. I
hope you're cozy in my insulation
because I constantly find myself missing
the warmth you brought to my chest.
I am hoping for you to
walk in my door, but then
I will remember you have never left. You are
so quiet, I need to hear you. How I
wish you would scream at me-the way you once did.
Your voice is faint and slowly shrinking. Tell
me how much you hate me, I just need
to know you're still there. I just need
to know you still care.

The sun hasn't set this summer.
The thought of you is always here to stretch my days
into centuries. Even when you are absent, in every
way, my afternoons will not surrender. Sometimes
I dream of stars and where they may be stranded now.
You tell me I imagined the night and every secret
you stuffed inside of my skull. Do you remember
when I would kiss soft songs along your spine and
in return you gave me stamps for the love notes
I still haven't sent? I guess I still say to much, but
if I didn't would you have seen the springtime or
those sapphires in your eyes? You still stare at me
as if I can be saved. I say this sweetly, I
have accepted that I will never sleep soundly
again. So grant me without a goodbye, and I'll let
this sickness make you sorry. Finally,
let the sun set, sing only to her,
and give me back myself.

He surrendered to unconsciousness in my presence once,
I noticed his chest rose and fell, like a sun
alternating from dawn to dusk on the horizon.
I admired how the curve of his spine mirrored
the crescent of the moon, even as they slept
238,900 miles away from each other.
As he rested it had struck me that this boy was my universe.
He is my universe.

If you need
some change
in your life,
I have a jar
of pennies
at home.
I was saving up
for a ticket
outta here,
but maybe we could
go together?