i cant remember a word that you were saying
but i remember every single drop of venom
that fell from your fangs the night that you
infected me with death and decay and refractum,
refractus, broken up or open in a dead language
that still stings in hexes and wills the dead
to life. necromancy is your specialty, commanding
a skeletal army to all your evil bidding, all
collar bones and wrist bones and bony knees
scraped up from all the tripping you've been up to,
running through thickets away from the white lie
of an elephant that haunts your room, conjured
from when you dug up the graves of every single
name that i tried to lay to rest, every action and
reaction and dejection and rejection and destructive
tendency, tendencies, tending to distract from
the subject matter at hand, the rules bent and broken
as you spit your poisonous latin palaver,
empty talk to move the empty skulls of your pawns,
empty threats of empty memories that no longer
have any kind of meaning to me. i laid them to rest.
i held their funerals a long time ago, and there's
nothing you can hold over me besides the skeletons
you left in your closet, that you never bothered to bury.
the dead don't scare me, not anymore, and i've
developed an immunity to your toxicity so that
you don't scare me anymore, not anymore,
because you're just another passed-on memory.
i will never forget the venom that drips from your
lips, but i will not let it run through my veins anymore.
your dead words and dead memories are all uttered
in a dead language, not spoken anymore, not real,
a dead effect that cannot touch anything because
memories lack tangibility, dead regrets in a dead
language that got buried when i decided to stop
listening.

over two thousand people have jumped off the Golden Gate bridge
and I don’t think a single one of them thought about how weak
hydrogen bonds are.
I don’t think a single one of those two thousand plus people
thought about the fact that it was water at the bottom of their drop.
to me, it seems common knowledge
that hydrogen bonds are the weakest link that elements can make.
people overestimate the strength of surface tension,
even from such a high place.
hydrogen bonds will always break,
just like me and you.
just like mentality
just like sentimentality
just like reality
just like knowing that i’ve only got a year left with you,
cause god knows we aren’t gonna stick it out after high school.
we’re a hydrogen bond in which
i am the hydrogen
because in every situation i find myself to be the weak link,
like everyone else is better off without me.
the problem is, i don’t know what other people are thinking
when they think of me,
because i’m no mind-reader and i’ve never been a good guesser,
so maybe some of those two thousand plus people who
jumped off the Golden Gate bridge actually did think about the weak link,
the lack of strength in hydrogen bonds, the possibility of water
giving out under their weight and their survival rate.
i read somewhere that no matter how you try, your body will do everything
it can to keep you alive. maybe it’s not just your body,
but also your mind manipulating situations to best advance your
survival probability.
because maybe, just maybe, no one really wants to die.
maybe, but it’s a big maybe, because i can’t read minds.

for every copper piece of me,
you are gold.
for every rough stitch pulling me together,
you have been a flawless seam.
you are every proton
and every color
of a chemical reaction,
and i am just the steps in between.
you
are a catalyst,
the start of something,
a star to wish on
as it streaks across the sky.
for every dark,
you are my light.
you are the match setting
fire to my veins made of gasoline,
your body moves like
those flames, flickering,
and your coffee shop smile
keeps me warm
when the rest of my atoms
are nothing but cold.
you
are a catalyst,
and i am going to be here
for the beginning of everything.

You're in a bar thousands of miles from home in a city that
your tongue struggles to properly pronounce
watching a seventeen year old chain smoking nicotine he bought from
a ******* the corner
when you first feel like you're beginning to settle,
a familiar weight settling in your stomach,
an old acquaintance a stone's throw from a stomachache,
so you slip off of your stool to stagger to the bathroom
where you clutch the porcelain and kneel with fingers poised
like a prayer to your gag reflex,
but you don't do it,
you just sit and feel cold tiles seeping a chill into your knees
and you're trembling.
You don't get up for a long time
but you know you have to settle and sit eventually.
When you go back to the bar,
a boy with a galaxy smile will take you outside
and buy you candy from a sketchy vending machine,
and you can let yourself believe that sweets solve everything:
sweet words and signs and cards tucked into your jewelry box,
tongues tucked between teeth in smiles and screenshots as receipts
of ten second Snapchat dreams.
But other people can't fix you.
Learn that.
Don't you dare let yourself believe,
don't you dare let yourself put something as fragile as
your happiness in someone else's heart
because it probably won't beat as hard as your own,
and it won't pump life into your joys for long,
and before you know it,
that happiness that you tethered to someone else is gone.
That's okay. You'll be okay.
You just need to learn that memories will only ever be memories,
that things only shine when you
remember that you have to keep them clean,
that the chemicals of development take white pages and make them
dark,
that photos come from negatives,
and that you've never had a predisposition
for rose-tinted lenses.

You’re not allowed to step into the house.
You’re not allowed to open your mouth too widely,
your ugly teeth bared and gnashing. You aren’t allowed to be that close,
so close your mouth and sip your tea through the window,
where expensive and matching dining chairs circle around a table
set for nothing, for no one,
because you can’t touch that silverware. You can’t wash those plates.
You can’t fit, your neck so long that your head is in the clouds,
your not-quite-bony legs serving as a reminder that your feet are still on the ground.
Can you feel your heart in your throat?
The way that it pulses every time you rest your chin on the roof or
the way it pounds when you’re at the doorway, much too close to this house
that you bought and built and you aren’t allowed inside. Why won’t they let you inside?
Why won’t you let yourself inside?
Invite yourself in; maybe your head will come down from the clouds and
your heart won’t beat quite so obnoxiously loud and you can
smile in a mirror while flashing all your ugly teeth.
You can’t build a house without thinking about how you’ll fit into it:
that’s basic architecture, basic design, basic
everything that you never bothered to learn,
bent on keeping your head so much higher than the ceiling.
Asymmetric, sloping,
like your shoulders and the alignment of your eyes
and your crooked smiles and ******* tongue,
like white lies and broken foundations
and a doorknob that doesn’t work,
doesn’t turn,
won’t let me in
despite the fact that I built this place with my bare hands.
It doesn’t recognize me anymore, a fantasy
so tangled up with reality
that all the nightmares and anxiety ruin even my cloudiest positivity.
I built myself a world and a future
in which I myself am not allowed to enter.
Maybe I should brush up on my knowledge of basic architecture,
because God, I’m horrible at interior design
and mapping things out ahead of time.
I’ve tried just living without but the winter gets chilly and weakens my bones
and it really sets in without the warmth of a home.

YOU MAKE ME WANT TO ******* DIE, BUT THAT'S WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR, RIGHT?