Even in your medication, even in the early morning and the foggy air and the heat from a meal your Mother made you, one you ate as if it was a way to recover, your promises haunt you like a quiet hum that no one else notices, one that sits at the back of your skull until it softly melts into something that you call a part of you. And the rain is still there.
Still in its eternal state of trying to find enough within itself to break down whatever doors it believes to be knocking against, and you look right past it.
Your Mother made you this meal, your Mother was singing in the kitchen, the same one that you swear gave color to her milky skin, the same one where you saw that same skin bruised by your Father.
And you don't know how she can make such a place seem so much easier to step foot in, like the whole time you're just looking for a way out but for right now, where you are is okay. With some people, their dreams find ways to follow them when they wake up and then they slowly start to ease their way into places like the bottoms of their sneakers or even their shadow, and then one day, when you try to remember why you are here, and the way the winds would blow right through you in your slumber, you realize there isn't a difference between the skin that held you at birth, (the skin that was there the moment you became and the moment you became less all at once) and the things it cannot touch, and you see that everything is it's own language and has its own way of being and it is beautiful. And every day in your wake, in the moments you rarely remember, you lose a sense as to why, you even forget to ask about it, and it is up to you whether or not you find it, or replace it with the things people give you, because people will give you a lot. They may not notice it, they may not even have good intentions, but they will keep your hands full.

If you want to have ***, that's okay, nobody would blame you
Most sculptures are **** bodies, you told me *** is art.
If you want to **** yourself, I won't try to kiss it out of you,
Like a white guy. I'm not white and you don't like to kiss.
If you hurt yourself on purpose, I swear I won't ask.
If you hate yourself, I won't tell you I hate myself too. If you hurt yourself
on purpose, I won't make you feel like you have to tell me it was an
accident. If you want to be loved in the worst way, I won't hate the girl
that's willing to do it. Because that makes me a *****
and who wants to talk to a *****? If you want to give head tonight,
I won't call you. Sometimes scars look like stretch marks in the dark.
If you rail any drugs, try not to
wander in the streets. And don't cry if you cross any streets,
because i know your friends are dying and they don't seem to care,
but I know you do. If you want to write some bad poetry, I won't say,
"That's bad." That's because I'll think it's good and that's because,
I'm in love with you. I don't know what love is, by the way.
If you want someone to **** you, don't ask anybody pretty.
Ask me. I'm ugly and I'll say no. I never walked a mile in your shoes,
but I keep walking up and down the stairs,
like I can feel you creaking.

You have to fight for everything, even yourself.
Nothing was ever built for weak people.
But you are precious.
You are all the things I never believed in but happened anyway.
You are all the last thoughts of the last moments of someone's life. All I ask is that you always find your way home like you lose everything except for this.
Remember that wind is a language, like everything else, and every time you meet a new person you are discovering how to believe in people. And where we live, there is a lot of wind.
So in effect, I believe War is another way of saying I love something so much that I can't stop breaking whatever makes it sad.
And where we live, there is a lot of war.  
And courage is the form we take when we become someone else's second chance.
Remember that Earth is cold, that the world is a scary place to live, but ask yourself what the world is made of.
We all bleed the same amount, and we forget that if you ask for freedom then you have already lost it.
That sometimes running and leaving and going does not always take you somewhere else, and that in order to keep things, sometimes we have to lose them.

It's been raining for months and I can't turn the faucet off – which reminds me: the sea is yours if you want it, and you don't have to be afraid of a little rainwater anymore. When you walk to your car with your shoes off and most of your sanity folded in your jeans, when your feet slap against puddles and you are remembering that you left your jacket on the doorknob, don't ever wonder if I will awaken suddenly, crying because you never stayed long enough for me to write that song to the beat of your hesitant pulse. Your car, evidently can take you farther than my hands can, but no road leading to your house and no street lamp mocking you silently knows that I hang pearls on the threads of your sanity and my stairs groan loudest when you are trying to leave quietly. If you turn around now – if you run back and tell me that you want to be sky to me and nothing else, then I will let you, as long as you promise to bleed the next eighty thousand sunrises; I will stop mentioning you to forests and looking for you in satellites and in smoldering coals, if you promise to murmur my name when the horizon is stretching and prostrating itself across the late evening. I will tell you where the sun goes when the Atlantic swallows her whole, if you tell me about the streams of cirrus clouds backing up your bloodstream. And I never ask you to search for the wildfires under my shirt again, if you give me all of the starlight under yours.

Build me with frostbite covering my heart, build me with a snowflake constantly falling from the roof of my mouth, build her with an addiction for cold weather. Let every person I miss for the next 20 years smear a dab of daylight on my sternum, let me lick my canyon deep wounds with the honeycomb tucked in between your teeth.
I want to stick a panic room underneath the chalices in my palms so they aren't so timid once I hear you talk about wearing Sunday clothes when you had your first beer.
I want the next girl I kiss to have lips like daylight and her hands to be warm, her legs to be every Summer that lasted just the right amount of time, build me with gunslinger fingertips that touch and touch and touch and stay steady, build my footsteps with the sounds of a rainstorm knocking it's fingers on the ground of an empty parking lot, build her out of prayers for a flood.
If I didn't bruise so easily, if I wasn't looking for a way to be made of a river, if I needed the silence to mean something, then I would ask you to build me out of quiet revenge and goodbyes that stick in your sides like tree branches, I would need you to build me out of reasons to believe instead of reasons to be afraid, I would turn my kneecaps into strawberries in exchange for potter's hands so I could mold you a bulletproof spirit. I want to spend the rest of my life watching the clouds, I want to have a voice as steady an oak tree and I want to see the sun cry rays of light so hard that it has nothing left in it but happiness and tugs the sky so tightly it turns purple.
We are nothing but a list of demands.

I remember one of my favorite moments
Was laying in your bed listening to poetry.
You would wait until Andrea Gibson was done speaking
To announce all your favorite parts.
And I wanted to let you know,
That I would love to kiss you in the ocean
And I would love to be your lightning
As long as you promise to shake me like thunder
Because the sound of your voice makes my heart race
And you are such an naturally beautiful phenomenon
That I'm afraid of you, but you don't scare me, no,
You just make me nervous with excitement and awe
And while I pick my jaw up off of the floor,
I see you standing in the kitchen,
Pacing and wondering what I'm thinking,
And me, sitting silently, watching you,
Loving every aspect of you, and you
Never cleaning up the mess at your sink,
But just rearranging it into new chaos.
We were new chaos,
And I'm sorry if that scared you,
But isn't there something exciting in being so scared?
No one has ever been here before, they can't tell you how it will be
So let's accept the mess and brave it together.
And it's times like this where I wonder
If every time you were scared, you'd look for a safe bet,
And if I could ever live my life like that.
If I could ever treat my heart like that.
I wish you wouldn't, and I just couldn't,
Because all of my stumbles and falls and scrapes and scars
That I wear unapologetically and brave
Led me to that bed with you listening to poetry
And I was lost at sea, thunder and lightning,
And I was so scared,
And I was so excited,
Hoping we could be lost at sea forever.

The night we got drunk and told each other secrets
Wasn't a good night
But it was a reading poetry night
A looking up poetry on your iphone and reading out loud night
Our favorite verses
Leonard cohen, andrea gibson
We're very different for best friends
But typical, a boy and a girl
Stealing liquor from the grocery store
In my purse, under your shirt
Secrets
A few drinks and you're crying, telling me
People only see your looks
And I think you're superficial, get some real problems
Until you tell me
About how he held you down and tried to choke you
In the middle of the night
Another drink and I'm holding you saying I'm so glad they called the cops
So glad you're here now
So glad we're best friends
So glad we've bonded over shared
Awful secrets
Another drink and you're telling me not to feel self conscious of my scars
That even though they reveal to everyone
The worst thing I've ever done to myself,
And they show this without my consent to anyone who might look
That they are a part of me not to be ashamed of
And you have another drink and say you don't think worse of me
Not anymore.
And we have another drink and look up another poem
Read it out loud until the words are too slurred and we're laughing
Like the worst things that ever happened to us
Are only parts of us
And they can be remembered without falling apart
And forgotten without losing everything
And we have another drink.