Why do the most truthfully heartfelt
statements begin with, "I know it's silly, but..."

No. Stomach your apologies so that
the rest of you won't remain
undiscovered. You're a map made of
resignation
with feelings about yourself more
tangled than yarn woven in and around
all your bones.

I want to make brutal honesty the new
fad. Have everyone fall in love with boldness
in words
so that it becomes
therapeutic to hand out paper keys during
conversations
to unlock someone's heart.

Scream out at the top of your lungs,
I WAS A FAKER TILL NOW
and smile
because you know you've never spoken
truer words
and because
nobody knows it.

Honesty has now become your
secret, and it will be the lightest
load you've ever had to bare.

I think if you do it right you're comprised of places you grew up and people that love you. Things that didn't change when everything else did and those little unexpected moments of gratitude for your inifinite blessings.  To be made small, not in an insignificant way, but to be given perspective. To be consumed in love for friends, family-extended and immediate-by blood and by acquaintance-by circumstance and experience. I think if you're doing it right you wake to great the day, just as she has you, and this silly life fills to the brim

You leaned in close and said,
"There is no lull before the storm"
You warned me about the wrath of gods like you,
That you were born with lightning inside
And this is why when you cry,
A terrible flood sweeps across the land

I hold you near and the earth is shaking beneath our feet
You said, "You are the lull before the storm,"
And you kiss me like thunder, you kiss me hard
That I am a mountain leveled flat

And this is why your heart is not mine –
That when I leave,
I cannot take it with me
Like Mjolnir in Thor’s hand,
A heart is like a hammer

our love...
exists.
our love exists,
behind closed doors,
behind four walls
that push up against my lungs
squeezing until I suffocate.
our love exists while you
stand there and stare,
open mouthed
unable to accept
the fact that you denied
a delicate butterfly
the right to take off
that you set fire to a field
of tulips that were begging
for new fallen rain.
you touch me with electricity,
but i am used to this burn.
i am used to this broken feeling;
the feeling after your wings have been
plucked off
and every last layer of skin
has been set on
fire.

My friends asked me to describe you.
I failed to say a word.
All my thoughts of you were rushing in my head like a blur.
No matter how hard I try, the question remained floating there.
I was silent and with one glance, they understood.
The smile on my lips was the answer.

Kiss the calamity on my lips
and leave your imprint of
atrophy like a stain on my skin.
What is really a love poem
but bits of broken words
you said in your sleep?

I hear music in the distance
that sounds like things I cannot
romanticize with justice. There's
deterioration in the melody, and
with every beat
your heart skips I get a closer look
at the fragments of you that fell apart.
Somethings are just too personal,
like what I daydream about 24/7, or
that fire dancing behind your closed lids
that warms your dreams when
another can't fuel them
physically.

The biggest thing about ourselves we
could hope to have is our
complex. And even that
is pretty small. The ground can't
handle the weight of our hearts
and we're just begging to slip
into the cracks of the
pavements to our proverbial
futures. You always did
connect more to torn and ripped
remains of poems
than fresh handwritten ones, with
evidence of my glistening
fingerprints
all over.

We don't die like stars, you say. We die
like heartache. Real, tangible,
and then just gone.

It's exhausting being us. Half-lidded
eyes that reflect the darkness
between stars, impedimented acceptance
of where you are in life. Our adventures
are painful pursuits to locate
authenticity in a filtered world that
seems ugly every other day.

We move through life like a slow exhale
of smoke, hurt gathering inside our chests
lasting for months and years. This bitterness,
it burns. But we don't stop because
watching ourselves bleed is just another form
of living.

Life can be so full that it almost
bursts, or it can be depleted as a
vacuum ******* your epiphanies and
inspiration out of your body until
you explode in
self-doubt. You and I, we don't have
time for false apologies
at the rate of our inconsequential
breathing. We are not red-flags
in our own eyes, we are just
impatient for self love
to finally have a meaning.

It's not that I don't love you,
It's the sound I heard in the fifth grade of my mother slamming the door so hard, I swear it shook the whole house. It's the night I slept in her closet, because the smell of her clothes was the closest I could get to her. It's the time she told met hat her and my dad just weren't working out, when I promised myself that I would never fall in love.
It's not that I don't love you,
It's the time my neighbor fell in love with the boy who lived all the way across the country. It's the words that caused them to fall apart. because there was no way he could live like this, no way he could be with someone so distant. That was the time I told myself I would never fall in love.
It's not that I don't love you,
It's the boy who cheated and my best friend. It was the nights I stayed up with her as she cried and shrieked so hard, she almost threw up on my bedroom floor. It was the glimpse of her first love, and the fear of heartbreak when I told myself that I would never fall in love.

its not that i don't love you,
its that i do.