Generic poetry
And a Father who left me

Generic photography
And a Mother who I believe loves me

Fake friends, expensive brands,
Shots of ***** on the kitchen floor
After fumbling around,
Trying to forget about the day that almost killed me.

But how can you die, before being born?
Sometimes I imagine myself trying to commit suicide in the womb,
On the 8th month my Mother was pregnant with me,
The man who never sat me on his shoulders,
Never made my family breakfast,
And never brought me in to 'Bring your Child to Work Day',
walked out of the door and carried with him all the could-haves of my childhood.

Silent panic attacks,
No one validates,
Because they are silent
And not screaming for help
The way my eyes do.

Meltdowns after medicine,
Throwing up,
Being too loud and too proud,
Never seeing past the bedroom door
Because the days were just too much for me to absorb.

Not knowing how to be grateful,
Because all I see is dusk
And dark
And fear
And no light I've ever known.

Ten ways to get over your first love.

1. Stop looking for them in every person. In every street corner or behind the door ajar stop hoping for them to be standing there, that crooked smile on their face and their arms open. Stop waiting for the phone and staying on call waiting for them to mumble, "I love you, I think."
2. You don't.
3. Date other people. Date the boys who put their hands on you the wrong way, even if you want the girl who was afraid of skinship and gazed into your eyes the right way when she laid beside you in bed, listening to your hollow chest with a pendulum swing knocking the bones and thick skin quiet enough to hear a pin drop, because she wasn't the type to catch you.
4. I don't know if you can.
5. Forget how beautiful she is. Forget how she could make you feel like you are flying because 3 seconds later she made you feel unloved, like every postcard was unsent and every message deleted, every Long song ****** out of your ears. Forget that every time she didn't call you or referred to you as just a Friend didn't scald your damaged hands that that were getting ready to hold her so tight your hands would grow numb and didnt slice your eye because you couldn't bear to see her leave and leave and leave and how every time she didn't look your way you'd twist your neck searching empty trash cans and grey pillars for a number, a room key, something better. but be grateful. others took longer to die. but loving her was suicide.
6. I can't stop finding her beautiful.
7. Write about her. Write Everyday about how she broke your heart without even having a single clue she did and how she finally came out to her Sister because you gave her confidence to and how she is so ******* beautiful. But she is not perfect. Write about her flaws. Try to scrape your mind of everything good, write about why you shouldn't love her. Draw a blank, and draw a heart instead. Draw the heart and write her name in it, it's been engraved on every tree you see and every bus ride home is another reason to shut your eyes. Catch her in the shadows. Write the possible reasons as to why she's there, staring. Realise she never was.
8. Ignore her, make her feel unloved. You talk about her like she was the only star in your sky and you were a mere black hole. You were a chore, you were the person she pitied you were another reason why she couldn't sleep at night you were a fish in a school; a mere dark cast that swore to bring down everything she loved. you made her worry, you made her stressed out. you made her tired. tired of you. tired of hearing you crying and exhausted from all the times counting sheep didn't work for you and you needed a stab to the chest just to put you to sleep. you didn't do **** for her. She doesn't need you, right?
9. but you need her.
10. I am sleepwalking through the week and it is only Monday I see you and her and you and her and how she looks at you and I don't know about how you feel about her. I don't know how you feel about anything, about me, about the book you're always reading. I miss you. I miss your tendency to make me feel wanted and your tendency to make me feel unwanted, I miss your tendency to make me feel something other than sad. sadder. sadly I never got the chance to tell you this. I don't know if I will. But I want you to remember. You will always be the hand that held on tightly for me and the spark that reminded me what it was like to burn bright. I still feel you in every wooden surface and every look is just another reason to count the amount of chances I've given to myself to love you. I think I always will.

I once loved a girl, but I wasn't in love. I once looked into her eyes and I didn't see me. She's gone now. But I'll never forget the first time, I saw a little glimpse of a what if. an almost, a love dancing in the wind. how I would Long for the touch but we fell short of probability. our parallel lines never intercepted and I was too bad at math to find a way to fix it. next time, I'll look for my love in a broken heart.

theres a hole where my heart should be and its ripping the life bit by bit out of me
no castle to go to, no happiness to hide
no where to seek shelter for the upcoming tide
it's biting and shouting, yet gentle, and it whispers
you're just another lightbulb in the city of stars

So dear the art
I never had to finish

So spellbinding the love
That never got the chance to turn grim.

Frozen hour
Hazy season.

I died for you one time
But never again
You had saved me from
My life of sin
You had pulled me from the ground
Just to push me back down
I check my windows
Seemingly, it's safe and sound

But my night horrors check up on me from time to time
Speaking words that always seem to rhyme
Sharing creations from a poet that had a knack for gore
I wanted to stop but all I could think about meant more
I pondered how my suffering wasn't as bad
Then when we danced in the rain
And cycled past the sinking horizon

So I let the towers fall
And the chandeliers drop
I've lost my skills in building
Because, I have lost my muse.

I sit in sheets and start to fumble
I don't know what I am searching for.
But maybe,
Just maybe,
My head is awake at night
Remembering the space between you and I.

I'm going insane
I'm going mad
But I would be lying if I said
My life hasn't always been this bad

I formed anomalies in my head
When I alone
Tucked myself into my bed
And thought about how different life would be

If
He
Hadn't
Have
Left
Me

Out in the cold, out to fold into a ball of never ending contradictions,

Like when I tell the people I call my friends to remember their worth.

Because I often forget that 54 pills or the seams broken at my wrist could take myself away from here,

And sometimes it feels like that's the the only choice I'm allowed to make.

And sometimes, the only thing that's stopping me is the fragile thread of belief.

So what happens when I lose that, too?

The eyes are a pair of globular organs of sight in the head of humans and vertebrate animals
Or are the eyes the window to the conscious soul?
They call me the Devil’s Advocate
Traditionally on the left side of your shoulder, purring that dead angels lie too
The lost pulse has been cause to abacinate
The light is blinding but you descry right through its laments, where the fleeting hope sings a tune that quavers as classical
The light is blinding but so is the crepuscular, encapsulated in a vessel of defeatism, powerless to shift my sole.
Your shut asymmetrical globes are created boundless by all existing matter that make them a home.

A Molotov cocktail in the shape of a hollow *****, reminiscent of wartimes and tearing without the gas
I choke on the smoke rings of the lit wick and I’m reminded that I hate going in circles and around
But they are also vessels of protection, a place for kumbaya’s around the fire where time is used to back-track
The deepest longings and recollection in my Purple Heart cannot be explained by how it beats 115,000 times each day
To hell with the sorry excuses and fleeting ideas of the Beaujolais

The soul is the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal.
Let your spirit descend into you again, fill your body like the dripping of Adam’s Ale from broken pipes
Yes, they are cracked, but your chest is not a bird’s nest in December
They are reminiscent of, but are not the promises your teenage self-made to your mother, saying, “I’ll be home by eight”.
Press your hands to the aviary your beating heart has been trying to escape, touch it softly, and this will be the first time in years you've been kind to the keeper of the grey
Glaze into the looking glass and hold your fists back, let go of the sharpness of your words and risk forgetting yourself
End the match that pinpricked the flame of hatred, and bleed out the blue and black of yesterday.  

They call me the Devil’s Advocate,
You hang from the trees, but I don’t believe in gravity.

I had a dream of clouds of white
And alas,
all i've ever heard were my own screams in the night
I have too much sadness for my own body,
even though I had to live with the label 'fat'
Ironically, I have outgrown this marking
Only to make more on my wrist
I call myself selfish because I cry when people take a left turn
when all I ever wanted was for things to go right for me

I had a dream I was in Paris
With a love of mine I could never deny
But I find myself halfway across the world
Unable to talk to anybody without tripping over the manifestation of rejection, and fear,
because it has grown too big to be kicked to the sidewalk
like I have been

And still, these dreams are so far from reality, no matter how many I think of
None are like the life I live now
Not even close
I don't know
I don't know why my stories only have sad endings
But at least I have nothing to lose
Except the weight of the world on my shoulders.

Some of us make love
Some of us
Love
Breaks.

When I think of love, I can't see you anymore. My mind takes me back to 2 years ago when I never needed more than to see the curve of your lips because I breathed the air I now swore to never long for again. My sanity still slipping like I always do in love, I tiptoe for nights over the puddles I've cried for you, invisible to the world but they're all I see. I've been trying to forget you.

You have a smile like the joker,
As if we were playing poker,
And my luck was gone
When you left.

I find refuge in pure darkness of an abyss
Or drenching sunlight that comes down in spills
I don't know what it means to hide in the covers of shadows
Or reflections like a saving grace in the dark
Grey has never been in a word under my sun;
I have always been too much
or too little
For the broad shoulders of others to bear

I was moved to a bigger house
a wider scope for life
there were flowers and a breeze so cold I would often shiver
but there was smiling
and a place of worship I would sit in alone
when I was wishing for castles or a home I would be proud of
but often I would hear words falling from the ceiling

the kind that made me feel how the breeze did
it did not feel like home
how could it
when the words made me feel so small

when i was 13 my eyes were opened
I saw a home like no other
it was a dark alley in a world of chance
but I couldn't breathe
I would sit by the windowsill and dream of something better
I could settle for a nice cabin
a place to lay my head every night
before I tucked into sheets
no place of worship
but at the magic hour I would wish to be taken away..

at 14
my breath was.
I saw a home like no other
she walked down the hallway and into my mind
it was then I realised home was not a place
it was a person
and mine existed close to me
she smelled of cologne and I would burn if I got to close
she was a place I could lay my head
I need not stay in a castle for the glimmer in eyes, was a state I'd like to live in forever
her hands were gold shelves I would run my fingers over
and often I would still shiver at the thought of losing her.


I had found her
She had a beauty that was God sent
and I've never felt like I settled
because everyday was an adventure and brought me one step closer
to that White Castle in the sky.

I sent it to him one day, as I always did. I always had to remind him once a day that I was thinking of him. We lived in houses with no space for me. I was an intruder in our love.

In my life, I love you more.

It was true. I had forgotten how to laugh by this point. I had forgotten that I used to see my friends much more than this. I forgot that I existed in a world of my own. I forgot that now was a time and place, as well. I only knew that one day, we would be married, we would have children, he would work and I would stay at home until he wanted me to go back to work. We would buy houses and cars, because he wanted to. We would attend the events he wanted to. I would be quiet when he wanted me to, have *** when he wanted to. He would have *** when he wanted to. I would forgive him when he needed me to, I would excuse his affair because he was a byproduct of something much greater than us. There was only enough space for one of us to be wrong. I would forget that my mother raised me on her own. I would forget that having a family wasn't always better than no family at all, when he needed me to. I would stay in a loveless marriage because I needed to remember that there was no one better than him. I wouldn’t ask questions about where he had been, because he needed to be here and there. I would raise our kids the way I didn’t want to. I would not get tattoos I’d always wanted to get.

I already know this song.

He already knew this song, maybe one day before me he had heard it and thought of someone else. Maybe after me he had heard it and thought of someone else.

Listen, it made me think of you.

I had to love you more. I loved you so porous, boneless, skinless, brainless. You already knew this song. You always knew so much, I know you wanted to think that. You, too, knew that one day, I would stop loathing myself for long enough to leave you.

Oh.

I just wanted you to let me sing the song, too.

i've knocked on wood so hard my knuckles turn purple, they wonder why they had to be pawns in my game;
i've broken so many wishbones in hopes of fixing my brittle ones, specifically the knees i've fallen onto every night yelling at god to give me some of the happiness that everyone promises me i'm going to get
i've stuffed so many lucky charms into my mouth and still i only see the hope leaving my body, no luck of the irish for me, no *** of gold despite the burns i get from sliding down the rainbow
it was promised. it was.
i threw so many teeth over the roof that stopping the bleeding when they hit the soil became my new hobby
because which each part of me that i ruined trying to give out to the people who never cut me some slack, i always picked up the wrong end of the blade and sliced myself right back

if luck is real,
i was born on friday the 13th,
i've always been driving in a car without a fuzzy dice,
black cats are constantly crossing me on the sidewalk and i've spilled salt all over these wounds. my first birthday present was a clock and i can't turn back the time, on my wedding day my husband sees me in my dress before the ceremony, when he walks down the aisle he wonders why it had to be me. the shorter end of the stick pokes me in the side and reminds me it's all i ever get.

It was believed Macbeth was a cursed play, plagued by the death of the first Lady MacBeth. Actors were to avoid saying the name in theatre.
The opening lines were,

"When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?"

I'm afraid my life has been all three

Deepest struggle in the morning
Everyday, I feel the weights tighten around my ankles
Plum coloured bruising on my knees, from all the times I shout for help
Productivity declines
Rest assured, I am trying my best
Even though it looks like I’m giving in
Someday, I’ll hold my head up again
Someday, you will see how hard it was for me
In reality, I would never wish this upon anyone else
Only hoping for another reason for living
Never seeing one appear

Out of touch,
Out of sight,
Out where darkness bites.

It's 2:46
Correction, 2:47
And yet the only thing
On my mind
Is that crooked smile of yours
And those glassy eyes
And your ******* ability to take over all my thoughts
For hours at a time
Or more likely, you never left my mind
You are never alone
You are always with me
In my heart
On my mind
Dear God, you are running through my veins
But I know
I know I am not the type of person anyone falls in love with
And I know people like me do not have happy endings, with people like you
And I know this world could be an optical illusion and we could all be figments of a wicked authors imagination who made me feel like I had a chance of happiness
And maybe God is as real as the next notion that rolls along
But I know this that I feel for you is real and it is more real than anything I've felt in all my years of being stone cold numb
And going back, maybe we were all created in a large boom in the clouds
But as long as I am under the same sky as the person who taught me how to spell 'love'  with the idea of real, I will always be open to any theories about how the moon waits for the sun, and how the wolf howls as it sees two star-crossed lovers;longing.
Long is what I would wait for. But it hurts. But darling, I want you to be happy.
Even if it means that your happiness isn't from a large boom in the clouds I made for you.

There are people, whether you'd like to believe
With their heads in the clouds
There are people, with more than just tricks up their sleeves.

There are people
with minds that wander
There are people
who hide under
Tables, and ceilings, and shelves.
Or smiles.

When I was younger
I would squeeze myself into tightness
Some nights I still feel like that
When hell breaks loose
And my head reminds me
Of a boxing ring
Or a shooting range
Or a couple's therapy.

I aim my gun, and pull the trigger.
Maybe one day,
One day,
I'll stop pretending I don't hope for too much.

I don't know your name yet
but one day I'll be in love with you
So take care of yourself,
and give yourself away
because our stars will collide
and you'll be where you are meant to.

I don't tell anyone what's going on in my head
I don't tell the people that crawl into my bed
Like newly weds,
Disconnected from reality, I'm still a little girl
I have yet to conquer or even build my own world
Take me back to the days; where ignorance was bliss
Because what I miss
Is running around a playground, not caring if I break a bone
In the end someone would always take me home.
But now I wonder,
It's not clear enough to ponder,
Where home really is.
Is it the colours I see in my reflection,
Or a book I'm forced to read?
But always,
Always in the end
I lose the need
For breathing

you aren’t here anymore
thought they say you haven’t been for a while
not since poppa went home
he stays where flowers zenith and the sun never comes down anyway
i loved you before the lights went out
perhaps i only did because i had to
there were always no flights to catch, for you and i both
5300 miles away couldn’t keep us apart anyway
i still keep the sweater you knitted me when i was 5
tucked in with all my hopes of you watching me grow up
you were all the warmth i needed here
coursing through, becoming the angel in my bloodstream
think i love you even more, it’s easier for you to see me now anyway
but still so hard for me
didn’t see your open casket
but you never saw me in my mothers blanket
i wanted to be the last face you saw
perhaps you wanted to be my first
i still **** my father for this
but it’ll be the exact same cycle when he leaves
i still carry you in my name
June was never summer in New Zealand
but it didn’t need to be
you were always more beautiful
a sight for sore eyes
one i didn’t see too often
visit me tonight, one last time
i want you to tell me what it’s like up there
if it’s really what they say
if it’s really the better place they say it is
as if they knew anything about what you were truly like
but then again
neither did i

And still late at night,
When I'm waiting for the bugs to bite
I still look for the word
That described how it felt to be kissing your world
I scrape through everything
So I name it after everyone
Who had ever let me down
And I still find it in myself
To pretend not to frown
To hope that someday someone will
Love me as much as they love being loved by me
But it just seems
Like I am too much
And at the same time,
Not enough.
All I know is
I'm tired of the nighthawks
Hunting me down
Stopping me from shutting my eyes
— 12:37

The day I realised I loved you was the day I learned I could time travel. When I was with you I travelled into the future and saw me and you together sitting by a cafe basking in the reminiscent breeze that told us the story of how we fell in deep and how you would stay in the bottom of my heart forever because the weight of everything- I just kept pushing on to you when at 3am I would call you up to tell you about how I wouldn't want to die alone or how I felt like the world was too much for a small girl like me, would just sink you down. But you took my baggage anyway and unzipped it and made space in me to trust again. I went back to the past and became a baby again, needing to be protected. By no one else but the only one who knew how to open my eyes to loving again and the one that taught me the ABCs and put U and I together and some things become a habit so maybe that's why I can't,
I can't.
Let you go.
1 + 1 equals 2 and the planets crashed down when you did not want to be a part of that equation anymore. I felt the tectonic plates slipping and as hard as I tried I could not make things move in my direction, because without you I still felt like a small girl.
I had never wanted to feel the floor underneath my apparently grounded and stone cold body disappear and I never wanted to fall for you but I just couldn't resist when my legs turned to liquid and I drowned in all my desire to be something to you.
I learned that I couldn't help these things as much as you helped me to grow my own garden of worth and reasons for still being here but maybe like me, my garden needed you to be around for it to be okay to breathe again.
I travel to the present, it is cold and dreary and lonely and it is nothing like the movies. I do not think I will find love within the arms of another again and I do not think I will find someone who can make me believe that happiness is not a feeling but a state of mind but I know you tried.
I know you are trying.
But this is my state of mine
And maybe, in an alternate universe, the future that had always given me chills and butterflies, would be the course God has given to me.
Us.

There are a lot of things I can never put into words, phrases, sentences, analogies, a concluding statement things like the feeling of falling apart when you just can't close your eyes at night or the impetuous carvings of your name into my heart when there was no more room for you in my head. I search on the internet a synonym for angry I get cross, vexed, indignant, irked, galled; when there are things I cannot put into words like when I feel this ditch, cavity, trench big enough to fit in all my sorrow at the bottom, extremity, underpinning, base of my stomach which flips with every bus ride home. Home. Property. Abode. Domicile. A place I never really had or knew how to get to because I always got distant— Location. I close, shut, get rid off the tab on my computer and I close, shut, the laptop screen. There are no words to describe this feeling. The feeling of messy closets and not sleeping for three nights and finding meaning out of a life that had no value to me. So I wonder if things will ever change. If my hair will get shinier, if my worries fade away and I still ask myself if I will ever stop asking myself to do things I can't do. Do. Execute. Achieve, I have achieved nothing but let parts of myself descend deeper and deeper into a Tiffany and Co.'s box filled with dust that never catch the light and a Marc Jacob's bag of dimes that just weigh it down. A glass hammer, an inflatable dartboard. A helicopter eject seat, always throwing myself into situations— I can't fix with the same bare hands I've used to beat myself up. And still I try to make sense of the nothingness I am typing. Yet, I still take the train to school. I take showers. I listen to music on long walks. I try. Everyday, I try.

My maybe's, synonymous with my
What if's, synonymous with my
— Not my, 'You'.
You, synonymous with my
Heartbreak so permanent, my body felt temporary
Sadness so deep, my Mother noticed
Isolation from flowers and chocolate and candy hearts
You,
Synonymous with
False images of us holding hands
Real images of you holding her hand and me, trying to imagine a world where I was her and you were the you I once loved.

The moon feels lonely
But how it feels,
I know.
People just always
Come
And
Go.

We get bones out of death
And death out of love
We decide that we will never be enough

I ask myself if it will ever be
If just breathing will be hard for me
Because sometimes a hot shower
Feels like a devour

It feels like the only hug I've gotten in years
Because I never allowed anyone to see me in tears
And I've realised that this life
This life

Tastes like Sunday morning, realising that the next day is a chance for things to crumble
And looks like a fumble
With a noose or a handgun
And wanting to run
Away from everything that ever caused you grief.

Tick tock, I feel my time running out
And it feels like all I've ever dreamt about
Was happiness to be kept in the back of my pocket
And to never be the girl who ruined it.

All my life I have been that girl
And maybe that is my place in this world
To be another creature, cast away in the streets
A person, uncaring towards whether she bleeds.

Because dying is not a new feeling to her.

I felt invisible today
How I dance around words and refuse to inch towards my door
How words fall onto my lap, only to be wiped away by my shaking hands

I felt lonely today
How best friends make pinky swears and how all I can keep safe is the gold cross on my neck
I pray to him and ask, God, let me love again

I felt.. Sad;
The kind of sadness that rolls over in bed ever so often
But will never leave
The one that despite my tugging at the feet
Only sinks even deeper into my being

But most of all
I felt nothing
I didn't feel the breeze as I tiptoed my way into being what my Mother calls 'normal'
Or the hot water I envied, how amazing it would be
To simply
Just
Evaporate.

I finish your sentences by
Pulling the words out of your mouth
Lending language to indecision
Lending tongue to unperfected precision
When the others talked about the bad guy in the book
I never used my ears.
Horse blinders on my head on the fissured sidewalk
I finally saw the unfantastical you I was falling into.

I wanted to comb out the phone wires myself
To tell them it was all true
But with my fingers on your sleeping head
I could not bring myself to split time in half
And offer a moment where my digits didn't graze your face.
I could feel you confining me to the margins of a book
You were ready to return
But you bent me over too many times.

The first time we talked about reading
We laughed about how we couldn’t make sense of paperback
Unless we had a pencil.
We were more similar than you thought, no?

I still think about the highlights,
I still remember your lines.

you called us the perfect match that one birthday, i felt my bag of seeds fall onto the open sidewalk, the twines ravel into discoid around my feet and make me think your words are water to be sipped from your open mouth, your hand snaked my waist as the roots pulled me farther away from the night you told me you don’t want to bend over backwards for my knees anymore, my Puma’s always gave you cold feet but my inner thighs were still Ghadames enough for you to set up a tent, or perhaps, steal one I thought I had saved for someone special.

you called us the perfect match that one day. i saw you leave that sentence in the fridge and sip them five days later, face wedged somewhere in between the biting humour of my psyche like a power station without a generator and the never ending exploitation of the little blonde girl named weakness who found a place in my fingertips so close to your face, in my wallet, in the place I once used to be able to rest, but these shoulders, opened orifices for black holes, like Falstaffian stars that caved in, that were anything but the empty space we occupied on the benches of basketball courts.

Three days after I started writing this and the urge to your clouds hover over me once again glistens like a poison apple I don’t want to confess to biting, because this pain is biting, and there is only space for one. I don’t want to eat the cake at three am and hope no one notices it again, because they will, they will see it from the icing on my lips and the grime on my fingertips. I miss your smell already thought it sells for 10 dollars at the corner shop. But its you, its you, its just you. Your kisses on my cheek after we fight. It is wrong that I consider this a sweet moment. It stems at you pouring my blood into a kettle and leaving it to cook. But this liquid will not evaporate.
But I know these tears will.

tears meet with empty taste
i've forgotten the old flavour
but it's becoming more apparent i can never see my own face
without thinking i could cut myself out of this skin with a grade A knife
if my body is a temple
i often wish i could burn it down to the ground, and watch as the rain washed me away into the rivulets
as the people throw stones at cars i can only imagine them to be my God
slowly skidding to the left, it wonders if it can ever find a way again

To the almost love of my life;
I'm sorry I never made it that far
Or had the guts to say
That all I ever wanted was for you to stay.
Or maybe that was the 'all I ever wanted' of my yesteryears

Because now 'all I ever wanted' was for my fears
To disappear, and fade away
Just like you did so many, many, many, days ago
I never saw you in the halls, or dreamt of your smile

The only thing we said with eyes was, "it's been a while"
You filled me with joy and wiped my liquid sadness away from my face
And I'm sorry, I was too exhausted from the chase
I tried to make you love me, and evidently- our stars never aligned.
The universe never gave you the signs.

Oh darling, you made me lovesick
But now I think of you as no more than my once almost lover
And just a friend from the weeks I try to remember
But all I remember out of those weeks
Was trying to be strong when you made me feel weak
And sometimes, I still think about how our bodies could have crashed like waves.

Ironic, isn't it?
You gave me power yet wore me down
You made me happy when I flew too close to the sun and you made me sing sad songs and form frowns
And this is true, because you will always be, the once almost love of my life..

And maybe this will always **** me.

Don't go across the world for me
Because I will only find a way to make you leave
Even though my sadness is too hidden to see
I promise you, some nights I find it hard to breathe

Don't set yourself, on fire to make me smile
Because after a while, I will decide it's too hard loving someone who gives me what I desire
And I will only want you to go the extra mile
Though it's shocking to me that someone could love a person so dire.

Don't blame yourself, because I can never trust again
Because I run away from anyone who sees through this grin
And all I think about in this brain
Is that you didn't feel like loving an entity as vile as me was a sin.

I used to feel so alive;
when I was in your warmth
But now all we have is dead
And I've been sleeping in the cold.

When we were 10, we laughed loudly at the back of the room. Teeth buck, and eyes shut, shoelaces untied and knees untouched. I looked at my own reflection only to see how red the sun had turned me, I chuckled at the peeling, though it hurts, I knew there was more for me to see. There was no need for rouge- just rough. My best friend looked at her own reflection only to see how badly she had scraped the bend of her knee. Ugly was not in our dictionary, but neither was pretty. In unkempt braids, hair bouncing as we chased the pink butterflies we did not intend to mimic. We knew these kinds of wounds would fade. We didn’t realise ugly was supposed to bring more hurt to feel, when it came from girls who thought pretty was supposed to heal. And still, I touch the burns from the steam iron and the far-too-many cicatrices from the concrete. I remember the desire and the bittersweet, my body made a map for the universe to mark out where I’ve been. In my sleep I run through the wild wheat a thousand times over, but I flinch at the idea of female bathrooms and looking past the landmarks and monuments to see dirt roads. And still, we remained burnt, we remained scraped, we remained unkempt.

and in that deafening silence,
i’ve never wished more to be heard,
wracked with endless demurs of regret and remorse –
impure, impure, impure.

ii.
but it’s my choice, isn’t it?
to bear the knot of pearls come undone,
to feel it shift from skin to soul,
to speak of loving, and then let go.
(i see this now as a luxury i could not afford.) iii.
if i don’t rise come blooming spring,
ring the church bells for those left unheard,
wash the red from the bed sheets,
please unhinge my strife from the earth;

and know this:

a man is no longer a man,
after his unbidden pillage,
has left an innocent soul shaken;
unholy.

holy, holy, holy.

I told strangers about the way you left me
They got off the train and did exactly the same
I dozed off in class and imagined you to be there, holding my hand under the table or passing me a note
I knew it was my only choice
To resort to sleep just to see your face again
I feel myself forgetting you
Your laugh
Your shoe size
Your coveted heart
I wanted to own it
But I never let you give it away
You were too busy trying to return my own back to me
I shrugged in refusal, I told you it didn’t make a difference
I don’t breathe anyway
I don’t feel anyway
I think now I change my mind
Please call me
I want to see the face I want to forget
Bring my heart in a paperbag
Don’t sign your name
Wear new shoes, not your old white ones
I don’t want to stare at them again and remember all the times I did exactly the same
To shy away from that ******* smile
I don’t want to go back to trying to love you
Please don’t let me go back
Take my passport and bus ticket
I want to stay here
Wherever here is
Away from feelings I once tried to know
I tried too ******* hard, didn’t I?