Is it selfish of me to mourn my skin? Having seen the patients around me with no surface left to theirs, how can I still mourn a flesh Ive always taken for granted? Now I kiss the places the fire kissed me in hopes of aiding in the healing. But how hard the healing has been. Those first three hours in the emergency room when I swore that I could still feel the fire, as white coat blurs of faces peeled my layers. I cried out for each screaming cell. My eyes swelled shut to spare my weak mind. Skin, I would no longer want to look at. Skin, I spent hours tanning and pampering. Skin, I planned on wearing with confidence. Shorts and swimsuits, summertime smiles. I wouldn't know for some time what I lost when I was burned. I'm still learning to love what I have gained. Strength, slowly strung itself about me, day by day I dreaded the coming day less and less. I managed as we all do. I managed to scrub my own skin raw just like the doctors. I managed half smiles and choked laughter. I managed positive thoughts and dreams of recovery on the horizon. It looked so far yet so beautiful, so enticing. It is nearer now, close enough to feel the glow. Yet, it comes not without struggles of its own. See, I must remember to love myself. When the last of my strength seeps out with my tears. I must remember to be grateful. For my body's determination to heal has only sprouted from the days warped with dread and pain, I have grown. I may not like what I see but I needed to love my insides more anyways. This charred skin is a lesson I should wear without shame. It is only a tribute to my strength. It is only a picture of my resilience.

She said get off your ******* knee
If you're looking for my guarantee
A certificate won't help you, see;

The last thing I'll be is claimed
Cause too many times I've been maimed
By wild promises that couldn't be
Tamed

Cause she don't want to be a statistic
And loving shouldn't need contracts or logistics
Its melted into us
Read the cryptics

She said the only rings I want to see
Are the ones around your eyes when you're 83
And you've still got that gleam when you're look at me

So visual
Men
We sit them in front of TVs
Where barbie doll lookalikes
Singsong stereotypes
In search of the perfect man and family to cater to
The little girls watching think this to be fulfillment

I change to the news
And fake **** read the newest disaster
With a splash of celeb gossip after
Girls look to mirrors with shame
And I pray to love a blind man

Turn to politics
Where we find women
Like four leaf clovers
To pick out and scrutinize
Dehumanize
Objectify
She must've shown too much leg again
Because there's nothing of her words on the tabloids
Now young girls will only know power in their bodies
Wearing stolen ******* and a stolen smile
Stripping off her self respect with her dress

I live in a patriarchal society
That plays down feminism like a government scandal
I am oppressed
I am repressed
But this is not a woman problem
This is not a feminist problem
This is a societal problem

Forgotten dreams roll by on train cars
Lurch quicker than your mind will have them familiar
Run on coal blacker than his deep well eyes
And yours so strained from ever searching for the bottom
Find static emptiness instead

Like cracked pavement
Reflected in battered bones
With names like home

Where dinnerbells resound in a momentous capture of the wingspan wandress
Retreat inside yourself
My dear
Blow off the hand that sprinkles regret to crust your eyes
At dawn you will be awakened
Blow off your plans like Queen Anne's Lace
Wishing only that you could take to the wind the same

Carry a sunset glow in your shadows
And watch
As people, like sunflowers will be drawn to your light

Love with the girth of your lungs
Relentless and unquestioning
Offering and receiving
As karma sings your songbird heart tune to the clouds
They will part for you
Like Moses' sea
You'll magnetize such energies
Like instinct
Flying to your summer
There will be a clarity

Summertime windchime song
I hear its brevity
In your laughter
Like bitter cold rain on my tongue
Moments
We danced through puddles
To that summer song
Stuck in my head
Like your picturesque hello
And how it seems so long ago
A wink of times blind eye
And there we are
Street signs in tow
My head in your lap
Counting sunroof stars
Like sparklers
Streaming to meet our dust
On back roads
We race to beat our adrenaline home
Now let months go
Walking to meet the street
Laying a blanket at our feet
We talked to coax the stars away
Reeled in a shy shy sunlit sky
Like kids Christmas morn peeking
To see the tree wear its halo glow
And bask in memories as they grow

We like to fracture vision
Into labeled science fiction
Preach a separation
Between a you and an I
A sea and a sky

We like to hogtie matter
Into a mine and his
Telling anecdotes
Like land plotted write-ups
As though earth should be taught to divide

She's thoroughbred hunger
From her double shift mom to her deadbeat dad

She tiptoes through junkyard junglegyms
Collecting alleyway beach glass

She learned to swindle
Haggled survival with the big guy
Big sisters traded on corners

She was one
Karma mustve forgotten
While doing rounds

She's got an invincible soul
Stitched of disappointments
Wrapped in sorrow
Hope as a bow

He's thoroughbred gluttony
From mommas limelight jewels to daddy's sin-shined shoes

He learned to swindle
To thrive
Wall street walk on the 99%

Politician promises
To impermanent faces

Costly trips
To extravagant places

Mixing up "enough"
With "more"

Looking for happiness
In a store

Though it seems to me
Whats made of life
Is what makes life worth living for

The things you swept beneath the rug
The skeletons in your closet
Draped in dusty yesterdays
Reek of rotten some days
That must've found a place

The things you swept beneath the rug
All covered in deceit
She saw tomorrow in your eyes
As you hummed her yesterday lulla-byes

The skeletons in your closet
Some were people you used to be
When weaponized words wore
Bitter scars
And you forgot how anyone elses world could seem

The skeletons in your closet
With names like punkin and sweet
Filled your bed
As you hoped for empty eyes
Have you found now how people cant fill you up
With Houdini escapist stays

In life

The things you sweep beneath the rug
The skeletons in your closet
Things a cruel conscience won't set free
Do they find you when we're weak?
In a nighttime reminiscent mind
When you'll admit that your heart does beat

Things I knew you swept beneath the rug
But I never thought one of them would be me

You said her voice was like nails on a chalkboard you say mine is mommas lullabies and until the shrieking shattered glass cries you said you never knew I could sound like a familiar pain. I show you how its tacked to my shadow, say how a stay in the dark wont offer me escape. You said her cries echoed wolf to a choir and when the preaching drowned you out like school hall lectures you found yourself waiting for the bell to ring. You said her touch was like a doctor checkup and mine was family reunion hugs each time we met but I warned you I wanted to be the footprints in the sand before the tide takes me along cause I know she was searching your smile for a glipse of forever but I've been so hooked on your now that I'm hoping the future finds reason to wait. You said the shards of your heart she trailed you along have turned to lillypads in my presence and I tell you I know you must walk on water because I'd never believed in such holiness before, you say you only wish to make me feel full in no higher a power than the moment to make, I tell him to feed me freeverse compliments at no stakes cause the past cant catch us in its wake and we won't plot a plan for fate's fingers to break cause all I want is my now in a kiss I will take

You turned the broken glass beneath my feet to lillypads
It seems im walking on water now
And i know what it is to feel Holy
Yet so full

At the night's close
The winds whisper their way through tree tops
To tell of their travels
And looking upon them
We are rustled just the same
All hands at rest
While mine are restless
Shaking for a page to pen
In the solace of the the dark
Where you'll find me
Uncovering words in constellations
To scrawl on floorboards
In hopes that some day these words may carry me
And I may write
Words that echo
In minds not mine

You are a murderer
The worst of kinds
A serial killer
Preying on minds

I want someone to notice how far ive drifted how lost i am how tired how dead. I want someone to tell me how the song in my voice once sounded so joyful; feel the drag in my feet, the shake in my hands. No, i dont  want this cluttered mind and I dont want this used body and I shouldnt want to drown in this silence but I dont want to disrupt the hapiness of those around me with a sadness I dont feel entitled to. Pretty white girl and she dont wanna live? More like crazy attention seeking *****. Dont wonder why I isolate. Reason behind sadness is akin to reason behind actions and when all we can do is wrong dont underestimate a cry.

She empties bottles
Like she empties men
With a mouth that reeks of lipstick lacquered lies
She plays pretend on a siren song
Strumming his ribcage
For a tune that will stick in her head
Long enough
For blurry eyes to make a muse
Of amusement

What beauty the blank page holds
Like fresh fallen snow
Before the kids shake their slumber
Before the earth has begun to yawn
And I like to watch it wake

As fragments turn to sentences
Turn to fragments
Turn to villanelles
Turn to sonnets

As people turn to leashed desk job dogs
Or artists
Or lovers
Or dust

As I turn to what this page becomes
And ay there's the rub
As endless pages in days won't
Turn to endless days in pages

But the blank page remains
Timeless

I only wanted to feel the heat of the lighter against my lips before I blew it out

This house shakes beneath your weight
And I was never very good at steadying things
Maybe I'll just set it to flames
With lipstick stained cigarette butts
Instead

I'm between two minds
Two synapses
The cracks in the freeway
Take me to the stargazing spot
Tripping
The stars will drop from the sky
To your eyes
And I'm falling in love
Slow love
The way I told you to love me
But I think your hands knew to fancy me before your mind did
Tripping
We kissed
For hours
On the hood of your car
And the world was melting away
But it really was
Melting away
Tripping
And it didn't take too much
To fall
For you

Be a soldier
**** men
Be a hero
Be a civilian
**** men
Be sentenced to death by THE man
No no
Let me clarify
It's okay
When the man kills the man who kills the other man
Because we can't **** the men in OUR great country
Treason
Just the men of OTHERS
Loyalty
And I think of it like sibling rivalries
Ganging up on one another
Under the same roof
Now
Let me tell you of the greatest country in the world
Settlers
Brave souls who had to evict the native Americans
Because only savages don't have guns
And resistors did die
But we won our land
(Christened in their blood)
Grabbing at it like pocketed gas station goodies
And it was easy enough
To suspend your conscience for long enough
We learned
So last week I decided to walk into the nicest house I could find and claim it mine
It didn't work
Maybe next time I'll bring my guns
And as their fear becomes my power
I don't know what I'll become
But I think Niccolo put it best
Better being feared than loved
So we point our nukes at the bad men
The ones that live in the less civilized  (less american) parts
Because violence is NOT the answer, kids, but war is
Civilian
If you wish to ****
Go buy a gun
And **** yourself

I am not a happy ending
Don't look for me
In a smile
Or a laugh
Look for me
In blank pages
Tire tracks
I am not a happy ending
I am not wistful coffee break talks
But shattered glass
And you may see me glisten
You may hear my siren songs
But I am not a happy ending
I am your daddy's old corvette
That we drove to collapse
I take all passengers
And I am collapse
I am not a happy ending
Don't talk to me sticky sweet
Boy back away from my flames
I am liberation
Would you try to catch the wind?
Well I am not your happy ending

Maybe if I'm buried beneath these sheets long enough
I'll melt into them
Chained to the bed
By a fatigue dressed in fuzzy pink handcuffs
With your name scrawled on the side

Ravaged the light from me
So if I don't see the sun for long enough
I'll convince myself I'm not real
A figment of someone's imagination
Sent to tell them their taxes are due
Their fly is undone

Convince myself that if I stay still for long enough
I'll slow my body to a leaking faucet
Lethargic sleeping pill slow motion
My heart will beat the way I imagine yours does


buhhh





boom



What a heart you have




buh



boom



A beat
As though living is an art I could just master



buh




boom


Like loving was the art you couldn't grasp



buh




boom

Maybe if I dream about you enough
I'll stop having these nightmares about being alone




buh




boom



Or maybe if I peer over the edge of the bed
It'll look less like a cliff than I thought

Buh


Boom

Maybe my feet could find the floor
You once swept out from under me

Buh Boom

Maybe I will stand without your hand to steady me
BUH BOOM
Maybe
I never needed you much at all

Unrequited love is a funny thing
Torment
I'm glad you've let me feel it
Ghost like whispers in my ear
Tell me I'm only good for a ****
Tell me to **** you up or be gone
All more material
And you'll find yourself in my books some day
And you'll remember your favorite bootycall

I read him one of my poems
He complemented my mechanics
And although part of me laughed
Wondering how he heard me breathe the commas
Heard my spelling bee winner's letter placement
Still
The notion stuck
Steadfast
Push-pinned in my memory
In the neglected space where kind gestures live
I told him how I appreciated it
I should've told him
Boy no no
You don't understand
My mechanics need fixing
No not my grammar boy
I should've told him to volunteer
Sweet boy
I know hands are easier to work with than words
Touch me with both
Shhhh sweet boy
Fix me with your good nature
Let it wash over me
Wash away my grime
You needn't a good speaking voice
But a good intention
Warming arms
To thaw me
Couldn't hurt
But sweet boy
Too bad
We all grow sick of licorice
And I broke you
Like the mantelpiece momma told me not to play around
I broke you
For a less sweet boy
With a politician tongue
And words soaked in muddy motives
I broke you
Hardened you
Into a less sweet boy
With a polititia- err
Salesman tongue
And words soaked in muddy motives
I left you
Gone with the wind
You were the Rett
In the search for my Ashley
But he broke me
Like the soldiers countenance heading to combat
He left me
Wondering
Where all the sweet boys could have gone

If my words could bring you back
I'd tell the mirror that you've gone away to battle
My noble prince will return
(Though your best weapons were always cold words and cold shoulders)

I'd inscribe my name into the bindings of all your favorite books
As though some part me could find some part of you in them

I'd yell at every pillow
That couldn't manage to muffle my cries

Every song that sounded just too much like us

Every fairy tale that seemed mocked us in it's polarity
(Dear, I wish I could've spun us in gold)

Every picture we took
That now look too much like broken promises

I'd sweet talk the fridge
Into making me feel worthy of more comfort food
I guess
you always said you like them "thick"
After you told me I'd gotten rounder

I'd scribble ***** sick sorrys into the floorboards
Serenading the floors you walked
(I think they turned to water on your final gracing of them
Because now I'm falling through)

I'd tell the fractures in these walls that you were the best filler
The fractures in my chest the same

I'd speak of you in the highest regard
My bourgeoisie balance act
Always calling for a coup d'état

And maybe that's why when I see you
I'm so choked up
I gargle these words in my mouth
But they fall into a silent drone
And If my words could bring you back
I still don't know that I could say a thing

I can't remember
The last time
I didn't
Write
Your name
In pen
In hopes that you
May be
More permanent
That way

I'm a little sleep deprived, a little too high, (a little too low) a lot hungry, a little overstressed, a little unfocused, (unconscious?) waiting, a little sick from-a little more caffeine please my cigarette buzz is going,
a little sore from running away, a little sore from being alone

Teaching girls **** prevention
Rather than showing boys urge suppression

My mother once told me
"How will you know you won't like it if you don't try it?"
And though I didn't like the green beans
I decided to try her on
It began with sidelong smiles
A hug held long
Then a kiss sprouting
From her rosebud lips
Burning against mine
Funny how
She didn't kiss me like a man
Where I knew brittle
She showed me tender
Where I knew vigor
She showed me patience
I fell in love with a woman
So quick and so surreal
And though it's what no mother hopes for
I know now not to discriminate by a gender

Let me sleep in the crook of your mind
Controlling your every dream
So I may occupy yours
As you occupy mine

And I fear
That this
Is
    Seeping
Leaking

                   Feeling
A little less
                  Like something
Scrawled onto
A ***** napkin
         Sealed
With
  A lipstick               Kiss

And I hope
That you
Are
     Showing
Growing
                 Learning
A little less
               And knowing
More than
Mommas money
            Taught you
Wrapped up
    In a                 Certificate

I think
On an atomic level
We complement one another
Your name scribbled in my genes
(My jeans)
Must explain
This magnetic pull to you
Gravitating
We eclipsed
I was soul searching when I found you
(An object in motion tends to stay in motion)
Looking for my life's map in the stars
But no longer did I need look
I found me in you
(Metaphorically speaking)
You in me
(Literal now)
But it didn't really matter
That our bodies sang in tune
Harmonious
Or our minds rooted into one another
Because no science could really explain
How we met in a moment
Fell in love in eternity
No, no science can explain it
Nor does it need to

Play scrabble with our whispered words
Cards, you are my king
Play hide and seek
I hope you hide so well
I can find you only
In the folds of our sheets
Twister
With the tangible tangle of our lives
Intertwined
Monopoly, monopolize
Each curl of your lip
Is mine
Each muffled cry
Of love
Of pain
Of emotion
And I'm still learning to feel
The ins and outs of your games
To entertain you
In any
(Every)
Way I can

They say decide what you want to be
In the time when we are still finding who we are
And maybe that's why
So many end up unhappy
In some mundane line of work
"That will earn a steady income"
But I'm not sorry
I can't do that
I'll pay in laughs
For smiles
I'll never return to the store
And they won't get it
But that's okay

All I really want
Is this heartbreak
To feel less like your sadism
And more like some punishment

Your god complex
Troubling
You are narcissus
Reincarnated
Did no one ever teach you?
The worldly revolutions
Have nothing to do with you
And though your body is heavenly
(Made me feel like god)
Your words are not my scripture
And you are much more like
A churchless Sunday
Than a sinless schoolgirl smile
No, you never saved me
Dear god
I guess it's a good thing
I'm an atheist

The sky spits dancing flecks of ice
Shaven from your soul
We catch them on our tongues
But they vanish
Much like you

Paved thoughts
They lay
In naivity
Youth
Born into homogeny
Told
"Different is beautiful"
But taught
To fall in line
With the swaying ways
Society's norms form
Pin-up billboard smiles
Flash magazine swagger
On surgeon made bodies
Guide retinas of wide eyed
Youth
To mirrors
With disgust
"Different is beautiful"
We'll say
Yielding our whitened smiles
"Different is beautiful"

You were a threat to my stained glass sanity
Armed with rocks and a voice
That could cure a feminist
When I tried to tell you I love you,
I need you slipped out too
I found childhood dreams in your smile
Dressing up in mirrors for prince charmings
That never amounted to the ones I found
In bottle bottoms
Cigarette smoke
Your rescue was less brief
Supernova beautied death
In your Hemingwayan terse verse
"I love you, sweet.
I must go."
Darling
Tattoo my initials in your mind
(As I've done yours)
Just the way we carved them across town
Marking places we'd been
And now you lurk in
Every shadow
Of my
Every memory
And I can't do much
But cry
And smile
At our bittersweet demise

Rudimentary
You hold me like a child
Embryonic
Needing
Those hands that give life
To my skin beneath them
Awakening
The hibernating smile
That's away when you are

My prince charming
Wears armor of glass
Yielding a sword to combat conscious thought
My prince charming
Carries me
Far from here
Far from danger
With each swig
This sweet poison
This lovely potion
Rescues
A damsel in distress

You held me between barbed wire teeth
With ******'s tongue
You knew I couldn't leave
To the collected dust that was my former being
You told me so each day
When my eyes seemed to wander to the person I could've been
Could be?
Unreturned calls of friends
Forgotten faces
Lost and found you
Radio static numbness
I am yours
Forever

The music of my words falls on dead ears
You could care less for my poems
My sadness
But oh
How you care for my body

You know the story of the bullied who becomes a bully?
Have you heard the tale of the rejected who becomes the rejector?
Put up brick walls to cover the footprints where you left
Wordless
Numbing
A piece of me in your back pocket
Did you lose it?
Because I am nowhere to be found
And though you look upon me now
Puzzled
She is here
She is
No
She isn't
No longer
She won't
No longer
Physically present
Mentally distant
I hold smiles at arms length
Look for intent in a compliment
And now when he holds out his hands I check them for blood
Looking for the women he's left in the soles of his shoes
They say trust is a bridge
And I'm thrashing in the current below it
Cognitive distortions
Singsong anthems
"No closer, no pain"
You taught me
Sweet babe

Funny how
I write poems on my phone in class
Inconspicuous enough
Ignored enough
To be passed off as texting
Camouflage
Blend into the line where cool meets socially acceptable
Cowardly fingers pause in thought
What metapho-
Er
Reply
To type out
He notices
Smiles
I am ashamed
Of either my actions
Or my cowardice
And I'm not sure which
And I'm not sure why

He tells me he wants to make love to me
He tells me he wants to love each part of me separately and in my entirety
Love the dips above my hips
Where his hands can hold me together
Love the forest of my legs
Where my up and coming feminist refuses to shave
Lose himself between my right thigh and my left
In love.
Aww.
In ***?
But I want him to love the links of my words to my lips
And their ties to my thoughts
And feelings
So much more than my body
I want him to love
The fear in my voice when I say I'm sorry and I need you slips out too
I tell him I already love him so
That the love we've made without the act itself is too great
To taint too soon with lust
Dear,
I say
Must making love to you require my body?
Can I not love you being lost in the web of words you weave in my head with a smile?
Can I not love you serenading you with a drunk midnight poem
(Sounding more like slurred I love you's by each bottle bottom)
Can I not love you staining your name on each page of my journal?
Tattooing it on the forefront of my mind
Can I not love you being cocooned in the depths of your soul
Spilling over into mine
As you fill me with a content
I never knew I could deserve
Before your fingers can even grace my bare skin
Under cover of sheets
I do love you my dear yet without making love to you
And I do want to kiss you
And I do want to make love to you
And be held
A child
Infantile
Needing your touch
For survival
And when our bodies do finally meet
Each hair on mine will rise and commemorate the love we've made
But not yet
My dear
No
We mustn't spoil it
Not yet
For I never knew love and *** were synonymous
And now I wonder if this means my parents were in love
And now I wonder how many people you've loved
Now I wonder if the girl who throws her body at men only wants to be loved
*****
****
*****
I think it funny that these words aren't tacked to men
As they are women
And I understand now
I am an object
I am wrong in all I do
He kisses me
That's so cute baby
You are so very smart
I let him **** me

We died that day
I can see our mausoleum now
Stacked stones
Memories, overlapping
Beautiful and meaningless
Wasted space in heads too young
Too young to see the facade of this house
Falling away
As you fell away from one another
In different beds now
But mommy and daddy's would always love each other
Right?
Permanence was supposed to be spelled in your names
I dared not think it any other way
Collapse was hearing my fathers cry
From seeing mine
Choked by some unseen force
I think we can call guilt
We weren't meant to stay together
Alive
This family
Fate fiddled with the idea
Fabricated smiles
Serving dinner to the ties of your marriage
Us
No
That day aged us years I swear
Reality thumped in chests
Where blind faith once lived
Zane was old enough to know
Family meeting meant goodbye
Zara young enough to hold concern only in our puppy
Asking with a quivering lip where he might go?
I excused myself
From the room
The idea that this was real
And it must've been my fault
I thought
The blame must live in me
I see the sorrows in my parents eyes
I know the blame must live in me
Somehow
How could I have known?
The good in this
Seeing my mother's smile light up in another man's eyes
Someday
And now we're buying our new house
To replace the old one
Building it with empty stones
We've yet to make memories of
My new step sister
A step mother  
And none of my fathers cries
How could I have known
I wouldn't still be bringing flowers to the steps of our mausoleum
That life moves on
And how beautifully bittersweet that could be

Dark lips that bled of a love
So raw it could be spoken only from a drag on your mother's cigarette
Dark lips to match a soul stitched of runaway lovers
Lifted from your reach
And I can no longer find the horizon in your eyes
Stolen
By words he forged of hades blood
Rolling about in your mind even still
You carved them into you
To mask skid marks of his love on your thigh
Bleed out the memories
External scars to match the internal ones
Your tattoos
You say you imagine one reads "strength"
Another "fearless"
"Punishment"
The only beauty you see in the girl in the mirror,
Is the beauty you undo