take my voice and set it on fire because
i will not stop
you have built yourself up so high that to
come down now would be an admission
of your simplicity, ignorance and intolerance
that you hold above your head as a torch
convinced you are a gift from the gods
but you have been using our hearts as bricks for your castle  
and when that moon falls out of the sky
we are all going to the same ground
and only then
will i finally bite my tongue

you might listen if i could write melodies and not treacheries
of spirit, violations of the psyche
stabs that pinch just right (just wrong)

you might just listen
if i was a songstress seductress
a siren in your bed in your head
(i could make you listen)

bedroom--where

  Mind
      becomes
  
      dangerous

when the rain came,
all was drained from me then
i wore black for days to mourn myself

to those who think they could love me:
tread lightly,
for my ice is thin
in every season

every night i creep in beside you
and touch the nearest skin so i can count your breaths
the airs you breathe are the sweetest sheep
and when i dream i worry when i am not there to calculate them they will cease
like how words fall away from your ears
when you're not listening close enough

Alas, if I had anyone else to blame besides myself it would be you
And how ironic,
How "you" is a universal or selective statement
The usage applies to one specific person or many
However
Out of all the "yous"
You have had the most impact
You have hit and run and left the most amount of damage
Years since and I am still owing debt to your wicked brainwash wash my mouth
Out with soap because I am not to speak until I am spoken to
You have resided in a cave a terrible dragon in darkness releasing fire memories
Memories
Are
Powerful
Things
In a present moment your actions so long ago bring me backwards
And I trip over my own feet in embarrassment
Sticks and stones will break my bones
But your words have formed a disease in my mirror
I was raised under the impression no one would really love me
I would not be good enough for anyone
You broke my confidence and my screams
So no one could ever hear me in the middle of the night
A fanged silhouette hovering against every background
All the ******* times you dug your fingernails into my skin and slapped me in the face and called me
Disgusting
I hate the things I have accepted
I hate how I let myself be a victim
I am ashamed I have ever let anyone have power over me
It turns me on but scares the **** out of me
A shadow over my interactions
You have secluded my sense of self to rot
In a cancer that you have created
And yet I crave the realness of pain
There is a dark side to every moon
And I know depth and I understand the art of deception
The pureness of sensitivity
My hair stands up on the back of my neck
Always sensing hauntings
Invisible as a ghost.

i remember you as the boy who drew mazes next to me-
endless kubrikian structures with #2 pencils,
always leaned a little too close,
crooked on your elbow, making jokes until i laughed
my ugly girl chortle

you might remember me as the girl you did call ugly-
in front of your friends, my only few friends,
i didn't laugh when i was the joke that day
but i blamed my ambitious pigtails, and the metal grinding against my teeth
hopeful for future beauty
i couldn't blame you

i couldn't even blame you a few years later when i grew *******,
and we rode bicycles to the track
where you put your maze-making hands in my back-to-school-sale jeans
i said stop
you said it's okay
so i said it's okay

i still don't know if it was but i do know you called later that day
i sat nervous and twirling the thick cord around my fingers, my chest, my neck

you made me so many things at once,
things that i could not yet name

i remember you saying sorry
and me saying it's okay

a dialogue that,
to this day, i have not escaped.

during the quietest nights of self-examination,

i have come to the saddest of conclusions that perhaps

this depth is not to be shared: i am meant to swim alone while only once or twice reaching the surface to refill ever drowning lungs,
watching the faces above shifting through translucent waters 

some stop to stare and maybe stir the surface with their hands
because they have caught a glimpse of something unexplainable and shining
but never
 diving far enough to explore

and through this process i have decided you don’t love me because you’ve never known me
you are just another curious passerby
who doesn't have the time to hold their breath.

I am blatantly blunt
And maybe I say too much too soon
Foot in my mouth my tongue is impulsive
Word salad word salad wrong worded wording words
Nothing comes out right in the way that I want them to be more than just
Syllables pouring out to fill the space between us
But you don't seem to mind how often I stumble over myself
I feel stupid with my recklessness, my loving with abandon
But you don't wince or blink or run and hide
I used to be so cautious, cautious
Looking both ways before I cross the street
Now like a curious cat confident I'll make it, I just dart
You make me not care even though I should I should I really ******* should
It makes me feel alive but still on the inside oh the inside
I'm just a scared little kitten, scared of my own claws.

how does one so gracefully intertwine love and hate
as if it was an indistinguishable entity ever shifting through fluid states

an amoeba
elusive
esoteric

passion, not a substance but an undefined thing
it might not even exist if not on some quantum microscopic level where i live, where i have always lived
among the threads of the underworld  
tearing through realities
deciphering the dead languages that
may suggest an inclination of truth

we are stuck inside of a perpetual mirage
thirsting in the driest desert
believing we have finally reached water  
when there is nothing but sand

everything could have been anything
but it isn't
it just is what it came to be
isn't that amazing
isn't that strange

Art is
s e e i n g
Ordinary Things
from
extraordinary
angles | selgna

The
Most
Hazardous
Drugs
In
The
World
Are
The
Ones
That
Originate­
From
Our
Own
Minds.

you asked me who would hurt a face like that
then you spent the next two years showing me the answer:
a boy who does not like women, who has to put them in their rightful place
as cherry trees only to be picked from when men are hungry, (and they are always hungry)

someone who would hurt a face like this doesn't speak carefully,
is an entire thesaurus for cruelty
they hurt so they won't get hurt
even though they are never the ones who end up leaving
the burden is on me, it always has been
there are trenches in my neck from holding us together
i have the back of a thousand year old witch
still casting curses in my garden
to all those someones itching to pick my fruit
chanting
stay away stay away

The very first line of the very first chapter ****** me in
And grabbed me like Freddy in my dreams and wouldn't shake me away until I had barely enough energy to wake up
Between chapters the pages were stapled together
Skipping so many so many many page numbers they all blurred together
And formed a weightless insignificant half & half story
Faces and voices and quotations
Forgotten then regained in new perspectives through new lips and emotional injections
The story stays predicted with some adjustments
Reading from the same script every ******* time
All those run-on sentences are continuously recycled
And you will choke them back up with every girl you bring up
And then drop them down down the rabbit hole black hole where am I and how did i get here
All that remains the neon highlighted favorite parts
At some point in the story it must've meant something
But after the ****** we just all fall apart in our heads
Trying to puzzle it together and giving up and finally walking out the door
Ripping the staples and paper flies everywhere
Like paper airplane love notes thrown and cutting hands just reaching for one last hold
Language is multi-dimensional and the angles from which they're read
The lost pieces have lost their place
Lost in time somewhere back there wish I could have stopped it and danced within
So the end wouldn't come
If endings are just beginnings than you are infinite indeed
Because you won't stop rewriting this book you are trapped in
You eat words for breakfast lunch and dinner
And then hold your stomach after it's so completely filled you want to burst
And wonder why you ate so much of them
When you are the author of this never-ending tragic story
But you'll still pick it up again and start over for each warm smile and rephrase everything
Make it seem like it's the first you've ever read with fresh born eyes
But the repetition will drag and you'll need some action
It's never enough or it's too much
I'm never enough or I'm too much
But at least I can say I was in there before I was expectedly torn out in insecure panic
Stapled shut out of sight and out of mind
How many different versions of this plot have you told by now...
How many of them were worth the waste of breath
Because I was pretty ******* sure I was worth at least maybe a ******* pronoun
I capitalized to strengthen you and I was edited out all the same
You're stuck in a labyrinth walking aimlessly and waiting just to find another dead end
Leaving everyone anxious but no one convinced now that you speak true
When you've weaved in so many dreams and science fiction
How will you ever know what is real
If you won't let yourself trust anything
I was real and I was trust
But the world is fake and plastic like blonde Barbie dolls
And only the artificial temporary flavors of things taste the best.

If I lose you after all, after this fall
After the leaves change and death fills the air
I'll just lie to myself and say you were just research for the secret book I'm narrating in my head
Internal observer, on the inside looking out
Taking notes somewhere in my cerebral cortex
Somehow without my consent the neurons fired them into my heart
And it was supposed to help me breathe but it has only become more difficult
A carefully executed experiment but apparently I have
Fallen victim to my own placebo effect
Is it real if I believe it is?
Is it like thinking happy thoughts in order to fly
What would prove as compelling evidence
I have to remain objective until
A positive correlation is made and solidified and
Thrown in my face
Maybe it's the way your Claddagh ring is still turned on its inside
And I don't know if that means you already belong to someone
Or if you think that means you belong to no one
Who understands all this fleeting symbolic **** anyway
Who really understands anything at all

i fell into the world like an accidental spill
clean up on aisle 5
          oil spewing into the ocean
i am death and decay in motion,

a wildfire taking down every last breathing tree
         in my careless path

i'm tired of writing poems about love
sometimes i'm tired of love
but there's no running from it
only rinsing and repeating
crying and leaving
cutting and healing
dying and living

Pull the masks from our faces to reveal...
Our eternally exquisite interiors
Like diamonds in the rough
Man-made tools would not be equipped to dig into the hardness of our pasts
That have cemented patterns and cyclone cycles
Unending spiraling of uncontrolled instinctive thoughts..

Stop.

Backtrack, rewind, stop.

Where did "I" begin?
And how have I become this way?

i became restless when
the path suddenly opened up before me
the cocoon in which i spent these years curled up inside
has now cursed me with an itch
that refuses to reside
i have only just noticed the mold on my edges
in this cupboard for too long

a still life, a stale life

but i dare not say that the time was ever wasted;
i have grown gardens of strength
through floods and fires i have resurrected myself countlessly,
standing in those currents that should have knocked me down

and now in them i walk on,
towards the mouth of the river

i want to be swallowed whole

i still admire the innocence in others
objectively,
like watching a movie already knowing the ending
but still suspending my disbelief for a few seconds of tenderness
where skin doesn’t feel like sandpaper
and nails against dry clay
(a feeling you never got used to.)

a relief to think that somebody must exist with purity, a somebody, truly
for somebody
else
before they have withered
before they have been neglected to be
placed in direct sunlight

you tell me i am a bleeding heart in place of
an insult, a slap, a swift shove into a bathroom counter
say it like it's easy, too easy
to be this way, like i
crawled out of my mother's belly
begging for my veins to turn into highways that travel through the cities of
hard-working men and women hardly making it work
your freedom for greed comes at the greatest cost, and we are all
paying for it
the children hiding under classroom tables are
paying for it
the one choosing opiates over antibiotics because the
pain is intolerable and it is cheaper to die than to stay alive is
paying for it

and yes, we write so much about dying,
we serenade the dark side with guitar riffs and cannabis
call me a bleeding heart because i want to scoop all of us up like fragile eggs
in an abandoned bird's nest
and whisper softly
i know, i know it hurts to live
like this but we have to keep going
we have to keep trying

I am just an ignorant girl always building hope out of sand
Under the feet of destroyers
They laugh at my ambition
And stomp down carelessly
Onto what I couldn't hold together with glue

So I laid there, defeated, roasted from diglottic sun
Red and burning, confused and peeling
Waiting for the tide to wash the remnants of my failed creation
And these shells of pearless useless oysters
Away.

Looking beneath behind through as if searching for a small speck of dust
Some kind of answer or hint, please
All the while hiding cases and cases of confidential files
Neurotoxic venom building up underground about to explode in geysers of
What the **** is going on?
What are these letters I type in contrast to the static blizzard
Freezing brain cells avalanching down
Drowning in its overwhelming white intensity
Covering all traces of understanding
Seeking every last hidden-in-plain-sight human and universe motivation
Contemplating every glimmer in hopes it was just a reflection.

because you didn't think the southwest was beautiful in a desolate way
all of those ancient layers of rock
stayed standing despite the earth shifting around them
perhaps they are stargates that we have once passed through in other forms
only to come back to where it began
you quoted nietzsche to me:
"time is a flat circle"
in fact you said that many times
i have already done this, i have already made my choices
i have resorted to convenience when i thrived on the uncertainty
coming and going is all the same when there is no end
you're an old bruise i keep pressing on
the blood underneath fresh and flowing to the haunted spots you keep leaving in me
maybe i hope you can cover enough area that i finally dissolve
the ******* in me wants a reason to hurt
i really should not feed her, but she is begging
and i have a hard time saying what is enough
when i am so good at turning nothings into somethings,
and somethings into nothings

a poem a day
keeps the therapist away.

and we are still strangers who only find each other
in the starlit hours
our love is unconscious and ceases to exist
when you wake up in the morning, drink your coffee and realize you've made yet another mistake
you look at me as if you were expecting something better, lovelier
as if we did not travel through the nights so closely
as if we never went anywhere, as if we were never anything other than a dream

I'm not as invisible as you make me feel
So let's make this one easy
I just won't exist
The air nonchalantly breathed in as if it did not affect
I am no more
Not because I hate, but because I can't
I'll pretend I never drank in your tranquility
I'll pretend it never made me stronger
I'll just pretend, I'll just dance on my I'm-okay stage
That I even tried
I am ashamed of my own face
The machine underneath
On autopilot
Why do I believe
Feeling
What the **** is that
It is not this word or this word or this word
There's no silver platter with my shoes for you to slip into
There's nothing left but me waving frantically
At a decaying wall, spray painted "I Was Here."

...blame the dreamer, the make-believer, the great play-pretender. blame the girl that picks up every drop of hope off the floor with tweezers. we all want to believe. even if its obvious how dangerous it could be, even when it has dagger-like thorns, and they stab your fingers. we want want want something still even though you will bleed. blame the ambitious one. blame that ******* time that always haunts us. blame the one that tries to defy it. blame loneliness, blame that empty space, that shadow that lingered for so long. blame the encouragement of self-sacrifice. blame basic human instinct, to see, to chase, to conquer. blame the amygdala. but what would it be like, without emotion, memory..it wouldn't hurt to forget to remember. blame energy. blame everything you've ever tried to believe in, wanted with every ounce of passion you had left. blame money, we're all just slaves. blame the unknown course of human life. blame the unpredictability of the circumstances in which you take your last breaths. wherever you would be, would the last scene in your play be a happy one or a tragic ending..or somewhere in between? blame analyzation and rationalized thinking, the fact that things could make perfect sense but your gut tells you differently. blame fear and anxiety, blame what scares you the most in this world. heights, change, being alone. blame the girl that always sees light but is ready for the dark, she is waiting by her windows. shes prepared for the part in the end where the actors bow and you realize, oh, yeah, ****...this was all just imagined.

blame me. the director. the optimist. blame me, because i picked the thorned rose.

but it was just so, tempting, so extremely beautiful...

......i just take life as it comes.

Of a wilted rose, seek beneath, as is love, observe the masked beauty, of a horrid creature, just looking unto the shell, does not define a soul.

The phantom drifts around my room setting the stage for silent refuge
It fills my lungs with clouds and I lift up, up and fly
Eloquence through the flow of my body keeps my head safe inside.

in school we were taught about the atom, how all matter can be reduced
we also learned how to sew and use contraception
how to say no to drugs but
they didn't teach us about the other things we need to say no to
those harder drugs like narcissism, like charm
and the withdrawal symptoms, and the coping mechanisms

so yes, i pretend that i am dead.
mom isn't hurting though,
it is an ideal death.
because i have left my body, that body, that mind that was woven into his magic
there is a theory: that the moment of your departure
you step into another life where it resumes as if nothing has occurred
walking out of a car crash into your destination, safely arrived, oblivious of the world behind that one
every thing learnt best forgotten
i tell myself that i am dead, and nothing can touch me where i am now

but,
i also remember the lesson on the great continent of pangaea, breaking into bits
and sometimes i miss the self i was before i settled into my own crumbs

Duct tape my mouth please, censor me, i'm slowly spilling, run run as fast as you can, i drip gasoline, i'm dangerously quiet, and playing with matches, shards between my teeth, cut my tongue, the room burns aglow, and i watch with stitched lips, as the poison that resides seeps through the water of my eyes.

You are like ****** asphyxiation
You choke me well of my words and bring tensioned silence
That is only wonderful after it has run its course and I can breathe you in again expecting it to taste different
I expect and I expect and I am impatiently patient
I bring things on myself
And then confuse them while I attempt to distinguish multiple realities of actions and words
I fall for everything
I shut myself off as to abort my potential failure
But then you say something that throws me off guard so ravishingly spontaneously enchanting thoughtfully
And I forget that I was trying not to care.

We are the creators, we are expression in its purest form, because we just are, adrenaline, awareness, passions of the flame, wishmakers from the ripples in the water, lets ignite, like trick candles, there's always more, lets unbury the questions we put in the ground, make something amazing out of them, write down our own answers, resurface, those things we all hide, so that we may forget, the heaviness weighs ambitions down, just be, express, reverse origami, unfold.

i forgot how to sleep without you already
how do i know what i am
if you're not here to remind me that i am something

what if i only exist when you're awake?

i can only write when the devil of love fills me
i am otherwise blank and waiting
for its hot red touch
that burns and releases me back into myself
and suddenly i have so much to say.

once upon a time there was a girl named love
and she danced through the town
with hearts in her eyes and hearts on her sleeves
but all the boys destroyed them one by one
so she replaced them with diamonds so they wouldn't break
but the boys stole them and traded them for pretty girls
then the girl replaced the diamonds with stars
so the boys would burn if they got too close
the girl named love changed her name to afraid because she was
and one day a boy named chance approached her slowly
but she was already on fire and there was nothing he could do
he walked away and she was sorry
the girl named afraid never saw chance again
eventually all of her stars died except for one
and she named it love to remember him.

perpetually
         haunted

writing    
      waiting,
                       listening.

You're smooth and lovely and you'll slip easily into my veins
But if there's anything I've learned is that no one knows how to change
I'll fool myself into thinking no, it's not the same
And keep dressing up pretty for another ***** game
The truth is no such animal is ever fully tamed
I'll be one step ahead in knowing this will only end in pain.

The not-quite-last-minute
Can't-won't-can't-can't-can't-absolutely-no­t
Turn away walk away driveway exit slow down blow kiss
She breathes on a bed
Inhales exhales
Invisible cigarette
Pink hair astray
Understands so much, too much
Eyes send fantasy and receives fact
Fact doesn't change, fact is solid, is Earth, is stable, loyal, disciplined
She nods and smiles too widely
Blushes with physical vulnerability
Mind detached, the doctor is in
Observation purposes only
This is a test
This is only a test
She turns it all around in that bright-side way she does
Some kind of odd redemption
The most perfect awkward closure
Goodbye
We've ****** the whole thing dry
The last tension black hole intensity anti-gravity
Astrally-inclined fly away now out-of-body-experience
Separate space from time
Follow me down to the cellar door
Open, something inside, the last ghost
Makes no noise as it drowns in the vaccuum
Closing, locking, throwing away the skeleton key
Nothing to open left, no more surprises, no more last kisses
This is the most something of a nothing
It speaks its silence in itself.

i remember keeping the shower window open
even when
icicles were forming on the frame
we could see for miles,
the train always passing at inconspicuous hours
you made the water so hot
and we were just so hot

(for each other)

sometimes we would **** but
with you it was making
love
and joked
about how the tiny pinpricks of light
were people watching us
laughing at our
naked, animal
impulses

our sud-soaked bodies
our steaming cold skin that screamed
into the distance whenever
we touched

the strongest of us will find hope in the face of uncertainty
as for the rest, well
they can lay beneath the rubble of the cities they've burnt
and left behind
even if the mind sometimes leaps and bounds
to treacherous conclusions
there is more to love than hate
there is always more, and more, and more

you are a burning house
and i walk through flames

you touched my scars lightly
one by one
stroking them in small circles

the dents where stitches have been
the long marks that stretch on for eternity
the burns that burnt more than my skin
and you just said

okay

an undeniable emptiness,
shake me and there will be
no rattle
the mice that
lived in me
have ceased their playful ways
when they broke their necks
seeking nourishment
fools futilely falling for
tricks tried and true
stuck on repeat repeat repeat

his words hung in the air
like windchimes
after a storm.

as for me, i am just the
moss,
overgrown and unnoticed
growing over that stone
you call a heart

this won't just go away because you have conveniently removed yourself from it,
forgot how your tongue formed the words
the echoes are marching bands down a long, long street
and my ears keep ringing

you are lucky to sleep so soundly
while i toss and turn until i am pulled toward the beacon of day
i am a slave to time and pain against your simple animal rhythms
eat sleep drink drink eat sleep
and sometimes bleed

(but the way you bleed, and the way i bleed,
are very different things.)

maybe you're right
we don't have anything in common
i am a ball of yarn unraveling in your hands
and you like to play with the string

the moment is gone as soon as you catch it
time is a butterfly in constant motion
and it dies when you touch its wings