I'm sampling all sorts of
tears to see which
tragedy suits me best.
Misery is good for art.
My stomach is churning and I keep
asking myself over and over
why why why why why
didn't I take the risk
when I was already on a burning bridge.

I am afraid of
my own voice when
my thoughts are the loudest.
Some people find
release
when they break
things. I'm throwing
my self esteem against
a brick wall
and the only cracks I can
find are in
myself.

There's little whispers banging
the inside of my skull with iron fists
saying "Do it, don't do it, do it, don't do it."

And it's tearing my spirit in two.

I'm making things more difficult
for myself
so I can really feel the suffering.

Feel my eyes being pricked by
rose thorns, my tears spilling like morning dew on petals.

Feel the dull ache echoing in
my whole body, like a thousand thrumming orchestras to a deaf person.

Feel sweet, blessed pain as my nerves are set stinging on fire
like a comatose person after they awake.

I am prepared to go to dramatic lengths
just to prove that I am alive. I am
a rash trapeze artist putting my worst
foot forward in a wrong
direction.

Give me
a shove in ANY direction
except
where I came from and
I will be grateful even if I tumble
fifty feet down.

I am prepared
to feel the wind caress my scalp,
to make love to danger and get
kissed from trouble
even if perfection
only ever lasts just
for a moment.

When
my body starts to
shake, I imagine the
worst thing that could
happen. There's a riot
in my heart, ambulances
speeding along the
veins in my wrists.

My blood can paint
firetrucks that
hose down the cities
and bridges I've burned.
My lungs: a house on
fire, smoke floating out
of mouths and charred
skin pealing away
like dandelion seeds
on a summer day.

This is chaos and I could
find beauty in it. I could paint
a picture for each of my nightmares
that I dream in color. I could call
empty streets Home
and I could pretend that thunderstorms
are really angels crying for me
and that the mud I roll myself in
is their wet mascara.

But sometimes its easier
to be compassionless
to myself, and sometimes
I feel better after imagining the
worst, because I'm not there yet.

Dear-

Whoever
Will listen. I'm jealous of the
Places you call home. There is blood on the floor
From my heart clenching so tightly
And it's starting to stain my skin like
I'm a crime scene.
I know that this is lust
And if people have affairs with cities
I want to sell myself on street corners.

If the doctors told me
I had only one more day to live,
I would have a heart attack
and die right now, before I had another chance
to swallow fresh air like a
drowning man
or soak up sunbeams
like a black hole one
last time.

I'm making promises to myself that soon
I will be conducive, but first I need to shout
my anxiety away
from the top of the tallest building
just so somebody knows
because
on Sunday mornings
you realize that solitude is very different
from loneliness.

I am alive but at a cost of being a breathing cliche,
an old metaphor from bad high school poetry,
scribbled on a used napkin and thrown in the trash.
I am writing love letters to ghosts because I will
understand if I don't get a reply, and because being rejected
from the dead isn't so bad after all.

Each "Yours Truly" scrawled at the bottom
of the page is actually a whole other conversation.
I am telling you I was born to chase
things people can't catch. I feel terrible when
I can't fight and every word of explanation
might as well burst into flames.
Arson could tell it better than I could.

This is where I am in the margins of history,
lost, numb and trying to discover what's
good for my survival. I need to quit
cannibalism because eating hearts in pieces
isn't as good as being given them whole.
Keep your distance.
I am wicked and inside a nice box called disorderly.


                                                   ­                                               -YOURS TRULY,

Isolated, behind windowed curtains. It's at 2am,
your room feels like jail and
insomnia
like venom injected in your veins.

These days I'm looking at the moon for guidance,
waning away until I find a layer inside me
that isn't sick
with longing that physically hurts.

I'm searching
for loopholes in fate
and connections between drowning
and black holes to **** me dry.

My blood is just below
simmering,
but I lack the spark
in my eyes.

I need
to go to sleep
so I can dream
to be alive.

I could blame my fear on the fact that my heart
is made of glass, and that my skin feels so
constricting I forget how to move forwards
so now I only fall back. I cry when I should be laughing
and I'm not spiritual but sometimes I think
it might help me swallow
when all I can do is choke on things I didn't say, should've said,
might say
in public, in whispers between tangled
sheets, in emotion. I am carving a hole in my heart
and sealing it with special things, like the words dream and promise
and tomorrow and alright, so that if I shed my skin too many times
a part of me will still survive. When I can't sleep
at night it's because I know even stars die, and when
I sleep too much it's because I don't know how to live.
And in spite of the mirages that sunsets cast on
highways leading to
new leafs
there's chaos in my head that breathing deeply won't solve.