I keep finding bullets stuck between my teeth
The same ones you bought the day you decided the ceiling would look better covered in blood.
Maybe that’s why everything I say
sounds like it’s is trying to **** me.
But what do you do
when you stand in front of a mirror
with a gun to your head
and your reflection smiles back at you?
What do you do
When you stand in the middle of a busy road
And every driver is a different version of yourself you’ve tried to ****.
Every version of yourself
No one could love.
My mother used to get in fist fights with the mirror and expect to win
She says I look just like her
Maybe that’s why I wake up and can’t recognize who I am.
I checked the obituaries this morning
Trying to find myself again
It’s a habit I picked up from you
But I never thought your name would end up there before mine.
Sometimes I imagine what death feels like
Sometimes I imagine kissing you instead
By now it feels like I’m imagining the same thing.
Someone once told me that begging you to come home
Isn’t the same as praying
Maybe that’s why God stopped listening
and started smashing the windows of every place I thought we could be happy in.
Your smile looked a lot like the light at the end of the tunnel
Right before the train hits you.
I used to squint my eyes when I looked at you
Like I was looking at the sun
Or a car accident I wanted to be part of
I’m sorry I ever thought you could be anything ugly to me
You were the only beautiful thing in this hideous place.
I couldn't look at you clearly,
because I knew I would see my own face staring back at me and
your eyes were the only place I never wanted to be dead inside of.
You can only break your knuckles so many times
Before you cant hold yourself together anymore.
My hands haven’t stopped shaking since you left
I don’t know how to tell them you’re not coming back.
See, I used to say I never wanted to end up like my father
Now I have to say I never want to end up like you,
Which means I can’t leave without saying goodbye
But I tried to write my eulogy last night
And realized it's hard to write about someone I never knew.

Stay.
I begged. I've never been too good at begging, but I fell onto my knees as though the floor was the only one listening and I shouted. Stay. The vibrations of your feet walking across the room to the door I always kept unlocked for anyone who wanted to step into this empty space, where memories of us hang on walls as though they're clutching to not hit rock bottom as I have. You always told me that I was enough, that I was the chain holding you onto me. That I was the abandoned swing set in the backyard that you never wanted to leave, but that was too damaged for you to love anymore. So you stare, as if nobody's there to get your eyes away. Maybe at the end of the day the arms of gravity loosened their pull and let you go but let me tell you, that was the day I realized there's nothing good in "goodbye" and there's nothing more that makes me cry than your back turned away from me; that's if we're not counting the promise of no return. Ever since that day the mirror reflects a melting puddle  of "wait for me, you're going too fast", it was a cry from the past of everyone who's stepped out and never acknowledged what they were leaving behind. The problem with goodbye is it's as real as the promise to love till goodbye isn't an option. It's the promise to drip morphine into your veins so the doctors don't have to tell me its time to let go, we're in this together. Till the last breath isn't the breath of you or me; but of us. Because what's it worth to live a forever without the person who gave you hope on forever in the first place? And what's the point in walking away on somebody who's still got your finger prints on the sides of their face? There are always stories that will go untold, but for now I'm re reading the the volumes of your chiseled frame and protruding lips like they were abandoned in the attic. They sat with first kisses and locked fingers for so long they need to be dusted off by the same hands years later. Yours are alive, and cut and rough. Mine are tired, and fragile and soft. To this day, they still fit perfectly into each other. I don't know why I wore out so early, why I no longer found the will in me to do the things we did as young lovers. I don't know why I'd spend my evenings on dusty couches while you'd beg me to come out with you and watch the sun like we did. I don't know why I stopped trying, I couldn't stop the constant crying caused by a fear of time running out. I don't know why I ever feared time in the first place. It always went so fast when I was with you but as long as I was with you everything was okay. Everything was rolling like the days the tide was pulled higher by the tugging moon. Our picnics on the sand always ended too soon but that was never a problem because we could run home in drenched clothes, have the fun of tearing them off each other and collapse naked into the warmth of clean sheets. All these memories I keep reminiscing. All the younger days I keep missing, the clocks keep ticking and I have lost the one I want to waste away the minutes with. I guess as an abandoned swing set its hard to say goodbye to the growing child. And as the melting puddle in the mirror its hard to look as yourself and smile. But nothings as hard as being the only lover in the hospital bed with none of your morphine in my veins, and no hands to hold onto. No final breath for both of us. Only the realization that the only good in this goodbye, is that I won't leave me with memories of us. It'll leave you with the memory of me, clutching onto the walls so they don't hit rock bottom as I have.

Forcing thoughts to spill on a white page is like taking an empty pen and exepcting ink to leak art onto a white canvas. I've never been good at putting my thoughts into words, you've never been good at listening to what I didn't say. We were open books read by blind men, and music being played for the deaf. Never enough to satisfy, but always enough to appreciate. You dipped your dreams in sugar glaze and fed it to me on a sword, while I was busy cutting off pieces of my own with the same blade. Sometimes it's less about the meaning of words, and more about the look in your eye that comes with the sentence. Sometimes its less about the silence and more about what's filling the air. Sometimes its less about me, and more about what I could've been.

Open books with black covers containing stories never good enough to be read, words never long enough to contain the fragment of a thought. Maybe that's why I turn to putting my own in the complexity of poems, maybe that's why I'm never satisfied because I can never say what I mean. Sometimes I don't think you know what I mean, so if you haven't been able to read the between the lines; I miss you. I've been looking for so many ways to say it but none of them have been enough to make you come back. The thing about poetry is its never enough to make you feel the way I do. It'll never make you realize that ink seeps out of my pens with the purpose to make you feel something; but it never does. The thing about poetry is that you need to be empty to write it and that's why I learnt how to after you left. The shut door opened a new one which was the will to write about all the broken pieces of myself. The thing about poetry is it requires to see life through the eyes of things unspoken. Little do most know that mirrors and picture frames can speak novels of things forgotten which is me to you. The thing about poetry, is that I'm running out of things to say. I'm running out of words to spray on city walls, or carve in the wood of dying trees. The thing about poetry is that this isn't it. This is the goodbye, good luck. I have nothing more to bleed out for you, my mind is turning to dust. This is the last "I love you" I have left to write about, this is extended hands with empty palms.
This is the apology. It's me trying to feel something more than what I do, and as hard as I try to get there, I can swear that in nights of deafening silence I can still hear the sky screaming out your name.

I've always contested this theory of time.
This counting of sands in hourglass bottles.
They always said time was in our hands.
But I didn't mind because the sun always rose, always set.
I never yearned to stop it. I never yearned to stay.
Until I met you.
Until I found myself in your arms in the morning till dawn
and it never felt long enough.
Until the words that made me melt into puddles formed time tables that showed a past moment I never wanted to escape from.
From the falling of snow, to the falling of leaves.
The hands on clocks were slowly gripping us by the shoulders;
tearing us apart.
Wars with the one thing we couldn't defeat.
Until kisses could hold time for a moment, we could never get enough.
Inserting coins into machines so that maybe hope
could fall out of the slot into our empty palms.
Once the days got shorter as the air grew cold,
we had to dig up for good memories to keep us holding.
Your skin had already been traced by my fingers,
your lips had already been pressed into mine.
there was nothing keeping us together other than not wanting
to wake up alone at the sound of beeping alarms.
To wake up calls tellings us that life doesn't stop for anyone.
The cold coffee that tastes as bitter as remembering the battle with passing minutes.
Some battles are meant to be lost.
We lost this one, we were left with learnt lessons.
I never bargained for lessons in the first place, I wanted to be left with you.
Wars are temporary. We we're supposed to be forever.
But once again, forever is controlled by ticking hands.
And ours were never strong enough to resist it.

Loving you was mistaking a welcome mat for an eviction notice and never knowing where to turn. It was stepping into empty rooms with white walls and never feeling more at home. Legend always had it that if you stare into broken mirrors you risk seeing yourself dead, loving you was staring into your eyes and getting the same result. My mother always told me that evil can disguise itself into everything you've ever wanted, I finally understood what she meant when I would watch you fall asleep and start calling out someone else's name. Sometimes I still hear your voice resonating off the walls and it sounds a lot like the door slamming on the day you left. Loving you had me digging graves inside flower gardens because I kept anticipating the mornings I'd find myself buried in dirt instead of in my sheets next to you. Loving you was putting suicide notes and love letters into the same envelope and sending them to address's of empty houses. Maybe someday they'll end up at my door again. Maybe someday you'll come back again. Maybe I die too soon to see the day. I don't know how the story ends. All I know is that I've swallowed a pill for every flower that died on "he loves me not", and right now laying six feet in the ground feels more guarded than your arms ever did.

The smell of death seeps through the cracks of locked doors where you hide the side of yourself that you never let me see. I keep having search parties for the key but I've finally convinced myself that you buried it along with all the other hearts you've broken. The blood stains on the ceiling are reminders that in some cases the last place I want to go is up, and laying breathless at the bottom of a lake is a better way to drown out the sound of “I love you” seeping through your clenched teeth.
When I was 10 years old I first heard the word ‘anesthesia’ come from the mouth of my best friend whose mother died a year before, and she told me that it meant she was numb to everything. Nothing could make her feel anything which is probably why she danced with death and there were rope burns around her neck as she lay in a casket 3 years later.
It escaped my mouth for the first time yesterday when I saw you walking towards me with a smile on your face and a gun in your hand and the realization hit me before the bullet did; sometimes the side that is hidden from us is the side we’re trying to escape from. But my fear of death subsides every time I stand before you, why else do you think I ever let your mouth meet mine? The consequence is just as dangerous. You’re just as poisonous. There’s no way to escape this.
I find myself standing in the middle of busy streets where cars hit me but I don’t die. I find myself waiting for the train, but never at the station. I find myself in places and I can’t remember how I got there but death always looks me hungrily in the eye and loses its appetite as soon as it gets close enough to take my breath away.
I want to quit breathing, but I don’t. This feeling is so strong yet contradicting. So powerful yet, so nonchalant. It was last night as I lay on a bed with sheets covered in my blood that I came to a conclusion...death is my anesthetic, and you've been giving it to me in doses.

A little girl knocked on my door today, flower bouquet in her hands and a smile plastered on her face as though its the only emotion she knows. She steps foot in without asking permission to. Her hair falls down the side of her face and I was trying hard to hide the tears that were streaming down mine. She didn't hide her curiosity
“Why are you sad?”

When her eyes looked up and met mine I felt ashamed that I could be uncovered by a girl who I seemed to recognize but couldn't quite pin out the memory of where. She hands me the flowers and their scent brings me back to a time that seems so clear, yet so distant.
I tell her I’m not sad, but rather sick. And the smile drops from her face as she says “Mommy says that too”

It woke a spark in the hollow of my mind to a time where I used to hear the same thing. Flashed back to a time where the only music I heard was the crashing of pans in the kitchen and the fall of hard liquor into small cups that were guzzled before I could taste them. The sound of yelling in the bathroom and glass being broken at 1am when the world was asleep. The whimpering of a small voice coming from the dusty couch in the family room, where our family never gathered in. The stumbling of my fathers intoxicated feet as he came up the stairs to pass out in a bed that was made for two. I remembered her skin stained purple, her eyes shot red and asking her “Mommy, why are you sad”. And with delicate hands that enfolded my face, she barely looked me in the eyes as she said “Darling, I’m not sad; but rather sick”

In that moment I realized that sometimes, they’re the same thing.
My throat dried up and hands felt numb as I grabbed the girl by the shoulders
“What’s your name and where are you from”
The smile vanishes, her eyes meet mine; with one look she gives me the answer I already know.

But before I can tell her that I remember seeing her face when I looked into broken mirrors, before I can beg her to not get into the habit of turning her skipping rope into a noose, before I get the chance to say that love is not supposed to be fists to the skin, and rough hands around fragile necks;

I blink and she’s gone.

Are you blind?
You're back on the conveyer belt, again.
You're fooled by that you see, again.
You seem to be getting closer but you're drifting further away.
You see hope on the horizon which turns to agony as soon as you get close enough to reach it.
You're heart is breaking at the thought of struggle
You're depending on the bottle, again.
The guzzle is burning your throat as you swallow any chance at revival.
Fingers turn to black, lips turn to black, mind turns to black.
You're crumbling with the ashes of cigarettes
There's no rebuilding broken debris anymore.
Hope is sunken beaneath you as you lay drunk on the floor.
Miles away from the conveyer belt, again.
No going back to where you're headed.
No heads or tails to change the situation.
No more gods willing to listen.
Its over.
Don't inhale.
Life wasted at the thought of making it
but giving up when you get a chance to escape your mind.
No press play, fast forward, rewind.
No more hands helping you out the gutter
You're already buried six feet too deep.
Your hands are on your mouth, again
Trying to quiet your screams.
No ones listening
No ones wondering
No ones there.
You've created this hell for yourself;
just lock the door as you leave.