If there's a way to dig a little deeper into
       a new layer of skin, tap into
something in our bones that hasn't already
       been analyzed and speculated by
doctors under bright white lights on cold
       impersonal tables surrounded by
an army of masked, gloved and
       sanitary conscious individuals-
a method of existing that hasn't
       been romanticized and isn't cliche,
I'd really like to know.

       Because in vicious turbulent cycles I'm falling head first
for things that have been worshipped
       so many times in trance-like
moments of adolescent anguish and
       pretenses of solitude seeking introverts that lie
to themselves cause they don't have
       the guts to do it to others.

Who the hell is alright behind a smile masking a cringe?

       And all the tropes idolized and hymns
murmured by Sad folk
       don't really make you feel special anymore
cause you've lost your individuality
       by stepping into yet another trap.

But then again hating all things has long ago been branded as
       valueless, when in fact
values are the only things you're really searching for.

The brilliant idea you've been
waiting for expired
a moment after someone else thought
it. Implementing emptiness
has become your forte and scavenging for
adrenaline
within the souls of second hand tennis shoes
is representative of stability in your crooked,
unbalanced way, when
you glean nothing but
past tense grammar
on any given day of your actual life.

There's no grand story here. Go somewhere else.

And you can't even paint a sympathetic
portrait
of your dry and chaffed lips, of purple ink
stains beneath eyes, of words unattainable
stuck around your gums,
because the guy over there painting an unequivocal
masterpiece is homeless and
utilizing dirt to make a rainbow with
seven more colors than
your store bought acrylics ever could.

Pity is
stupid
when you've got everything
but that

Definitely not the type of girl to plant
flowers on a window sill, the type to carry
softness on her shoulders or a desire to witness
hesitant, supernatural births of new morning suns with
enchantment. She was a trigger
aimed at empty clay pots, balancing
on balconies and devouring emptiness as if volume alone
would make her feel satisfied.

And her body held as much sentiment
to her as a graveyard, skin crawling in an empty house
she carried in her head. Everywhere she went
stormy impermanence concatenated
with the things she tried so voraciously to erase, like
tethers
tying her name down to insipid figures, like
beginning chapters of stories
she didn't want to hear
with a protagonist
too similar, too homespun,
to herself.

Perhaps she had intention of detonating in
her final, grand exit strategy, an elaborate move
where the Queen conquered escapism, but now
but now

no one will ever know.

I haven't written anything in a while because
my shaky muse is just
a rogue gunshot from a pair of very uncertain hands
and I'm trying hard to swallow the barrel
but my stomach is sapped and struggles and quivers to hold
anything substantial down. My body is just a side-effect
of something so painfully small and
I'm learning that my obsession with
heart palpitations through smoke and stubbornness
makes me recoil in the daylight.

My eyes are growing old and decrepit
when I stop seeing things as stories to unfold,
and instead view them as a very dull reflections of my surroundings.

I was
busy planting flowers on other
planets for my great
escape to a world where people
don't laugh at your possibility of doing
terrific things, a world where your bone truth
doesn't make you feel vulnerable like
someone skinned you raw.

What a rude awakening to find out that the stratosphere
doesn't hold the answers that will make
me feel alright. My little red rocket was just a futile dream
and now that the impenetrable glass
ceiling has been meticulously charted in every possible
direction I am
directionless.

I only ever knew to keep looking up
because the horizon never seemed as close.

And now every other worn out soul
who was waiting in the line, still as ice,
to get on board
is ******* and hurt
at the harsh reality of their situation.
Park benches have lost their romance
and 3am is nothing but bleak,
when your spirit is rotting
in the trash bin besides you.

A kind of blue lay
thick over her,
swallowing mouthfuls of suffocation
and drowning in nourishment. It's times like these
when the person you are today
doubts if they can reinvent themselves in time
for tomorrow. Blue is everywhere
like your perspective is bruised
and it feels like hell.

The familiar grip of apathy
makes everything foreign
and you're wilting under water like
some kind of mutant...

Observing people talk with an unrestrained
fluidness is enchanting and why doesn't
your erratic behaviour include something useful
in its repertoire? You swallow things that burn
but spit it out again because
all the nerves in your system left you
for a love affair less volatile.

This kind of blue is fickle. Its melancholy
in a heartbeat. It makes you lie awake
in bed until the sheets have lost the warmth
of your empty touch, examine heartbreak like
its a specimen of a scientific experiment. It makes
you hyper aware of nostalgia at 3am. It takes your
breath away and clouds your eyes with an absent minded
look. It's a surge of sorrow and a burst of hope
unceasingly whispering in your ear...

Someone's talking but you're not listening. The world's
troubles are rippling through you, and
this kind of blue makes you silent.
This kind of blue is you.

Where do you worship when you've
been exuded
from the fire escapes of every building
that you've ever been blessed inside,
when all the holy skin
you've been revering night after night

comes to a shuddering end
like a life line slipping
out of chafed fingers? Sirens wail
wantonly during the peak of the moon's
reign, and
is it an ambulance or
a body that will salvage you in

your most vulnerable
hour, after
you finish playing the part of the secret anti-hero
and have nothing left to give
but platonic ecstasy? Cheap
lighters
are littered behind your departure

like footprints, but
the useless
manifestos you preach behind every moan
won't ever be forsaken
in your trail of dust and suggestions
of abeyant arson,

because you're just living how
you were born to endure: like a star, burning,
burning, and far away.

What is a name but a mask of an
      empty mind, for bodies are just callous
shapes of the odd DNA
      handed to us from destroyed
generations. It would be nice if I
      could look you straight in the eye and speak
with incomparable
      honesty, but I'm reminded of the blinding glare
illuminating like blue lightning behind my eyes
      of past bridges burned down with that tactic.

Listening to staggering silence
      prompts me to unravel the one pinnacle
thread to my existence. I'll tell you my weakest
      point before you even get the darts
out. Indecision is my only theme,
      and you found it out. You found
it out. I'm grinding my bones with an iron pestle,
      and sifting through the dust as a last resort that
there really isn't anything more
      to my meager existence. I don't want anyone to know
that I'm nothing more than my empty words,
      but every time I part my stale lips,
the truth comes out and I'm busted.

A girl once investigated her tousled
      subconscious, for starry-eyed symbolism in
dreams was a better navigator of
      real life than battery-powered bleakness of
her daily alarm. When little boys pretend to be
      sailors they forget to be lost under foreign stars
as well, kneeling on wooden decks and blistered
      knees just to plead with the unrelenting new
moon to tranquilize its harshness, just a little bit,
      to peal a layer of its sinister skin and
shed some light on the
      twisting abyss ahead. Among all the apologies
sowed deeply in my ribcage
      there is a haunting song reverberating
in my bones that is
      faithless to what my chapped lips preach.

existing minimally can be such fun, for
oblivion wraps its fine fingers
delicately around my neck
in flirtation, and I see red and think
its love and war.
I like myself better when I exist
on precipices, hanging onto something
untouchable and trying to be
a little less star-crossed at another
tragedy, for I'm a poet
and not a hero.

Pour a tragedy into
my hand and allow the
novelty to drench my fingers
and seep my skin. I'm
jealous of my age yesterday
and the person
who I might be tomorrow.
What a baffling existence we lead every
morning after the awe of
the sunrise
has dissipated.

When
the world outside my
window looks like a charcoal smudge
on the back of my fist, I think
of the uncoiling stillness bleeding
in and out of me with each breath. I'm wholeheartedly
in love with
thoughtless first times, but
I'd rather burn a bad first
draft and recklessly risk scorching
my fingers
instead.

I burn my tongue on coffee every
morning and shiver myself to sleep.
But one thing I learned today
is that a colorless existence is normal
for most people
until you have the courage
to spill a little blood
and believe that red is
the most beautiful color.

Heroes are
parched
for a good
story, searching for
the ending in a bleeding
sunset, while the
damsel in distress
is a prayer
the hero
will never pray.

We are the ruins of
our ancestors, and
because of that
it is sometimes hard
to feel
alive.

We cannot be taught to bury
time, but within us are
thousands upon thousands of stories
piled high like ruined castles
where we might find some magic
power
that comes close enough
to touching the sun without
an aftertaste of ash.

She ran freely in the wind, hair in disarray
Faster than the alpha wolves every night and day
Who nipped at her heels, though she never backed down
At the prospect of conjuring herself a new crown.
Her craft wasn't thieving, deceiving or conceiving
Pandora was a girl consumed by achieving
The next great adventure, taken like a pill
Her soul yearned for a magic touch to fulfill
Her wildest dreams; curiosity, sated
Pale hands; a gilded box; finally, elated
That all the things she never knew were beneath one lid
How DARE the world deprive her and declare they forbid
Efficacious Pandora to chain her passion
Spinelessly docile just wasn't her fashion
So she carefully crept in the dark of night
And beheld in the box a new strange light
An army of miseries glowing vivid and real
(But she had never lived with behavior ideal)
Now Hate, Selfisness, and Jealously shone like jewels
But at least I made the history books now, Pandora thought,
because I
                 broke
                       ­     the
                                    rules.

In a grassy ditch,
lets lie on our backs
until its dark enough to pretend
we're in a meadow far away from here.
There's a skyline in the stars
and we're young and determined enough
to plan to get right to the edge
of the milky way
someday, when our hands
have held the other's for so
long that there's an imprint in the lines
so deep a psychic couldn't tell
us apart.

We are the heroes in a miniature
wasteland world and there's a fire
in your eyes when you look out
across our kingdom
and declare that
hell has never burned so bright.

Having a happy ending is still
an ending. We carry tender
little tragedies wherever we go, and hope
one day, we'll be
older than our bones.

Over thinking
about nothing and spiralling deeper
and deeper into a vast and useless
consciousness is just another form of suicide
that you hear about on the internet.

I'm not bringing myself down into the dirt
again this time just because it's a better
point of view for
you. I know I'm just here for when
your stability gets too boring, and I'm a
liar now
because I shouted to the world from
rooftops and
illicitly whispered on street
corners that I was done
complaining.

And yet here I am, and here you are,
looking at me in the dirt. It's in my eyes
and now you look like it, too.

I guess I'm not strong yet
and I could try to twist this whole
situation into something desirable
and exotic and beautiful, but I will end up
hating those words. Tears don't
water the seeds of new beginnings and
despair isn't just a mask
that will one day wash
off, when in reality
it's your face
that you try to pry off every
evening while looking in the mirror.

Surrendering is violent.
And yet
even soldiers
must rest.

We could be eternal
if fate didn't rest in our
crumbling lungs. The stars in your
eyes will eventually turn to
dust, but know that right
now the imprints of
constellations on your skin
are the brightest object
in the night.

Every story ends and even
heroes die.

But know there's something divine
in the heart-palpitating chaos of
everlasting
stillness.

May
wild beauty
in these decaying
words
be what I leave behind.

For a girl who tasted of summer
and was just as hot-tempered,
she closed all her doors like there was
a cold winter's draft.

Stalactite tears gathering
in the belly of cavernous
hearts. She is soft and hard and
silk and steel and so many
different faceted shards.

I know how you feel
when you feel nothing. And sometimes,
it's hard putting it into words.

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 wish kisses could leave
scars, and pain
would leave no trace of its
presence behind. I've been
to so many places with strangers
and each time I imagined it was some version of you
with me instead.

Save our own hearts by
entering another. Devouring another.
I'm not sure what love is
but faulty incantations, a changing
forecast in stormy minds.
I'm denying myself again from touching
the truth because

holding someone forever and
into eternity
is difficult to comprehend for
a mind that feels more alone when looking
at the stars,
for someone who feels like an intruder
in the house they grew up
in, and is still searching
underneath doormats for "home".

It would be nice for a breeze to catch
my lungs like a net
and whisk me away from
where I stand
against myself. I'm hoping sooner or later
I'll get lost enough in a warm place
that wholly embraces me in ways
I can't for myself.

I'll lie on my back
with dignity's shadow blanketed
over me. The clouds are in the shape
of an hourglass, and they spell out
my glory days
in shades of goodbye.

Unwarranted and unlocked memories.
Closed doors that I
clawed at, snubbed
fingers and blistered emotions. There are novels
filled with what ifs underneath the dirt
of my fingernails. I'd like to resubmit my
application
of trying again
to whoever has the time to
listen to hallow words.

After all this time
I have been as vapid as a dissipating
cloud. My legacy will be
sinking my teeth into
forbidden fruit laced with
ambition. Its the worst drug. You only
need one taste for it to
affect you forever, and one mistake
for it to choke you.

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.

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.

There are some days when
every encounter becomes a confrontation,
when every incident
feels like an army of arrows
piercing through the shattered remains of your armor.

These are the days where you must teach yourself
to breath deeply all over again,
that your hands weren't always
balled into fists, but that once
held the hand of another.

Sometimes there are days when
you are invisible to affection. You are a ghost
to the ones you crave to love you.
You are withering under a stranger's stare
and ****** you just want to be held
until the cavity in your chest feels warmth again.

You cannot bare to be alone because when
no one's around its easier to decay into
your own sorry nightmare, when all you want
is solitude to override the static in your head.

But just know
it's alright to feel like everything
is just a little too much.
It's alright to unclench your heart
and let your soul spill over
until the air around you is moist
with your tears.
Feel for those
who can't, because
if I could I'd do the same
for you.

Sometimes time is unfair. When I said hello
the universe only gave me one moment
to express every facet of my soul,
everything I felt
and everything I wanted to feel
because of you.

I will never think of the perfect
thing to say under pressure, maybe
because I'm not clever enough, or because
or I don't know enough vocabulary words,
or because something in me
is lacking.

But even though I only had one moment
to catch your gaze, smile, and greet with
one measly hello
that couldn't possibly
hold all the overflowing
emotions clogged in my
throat, when you smiled
back

and stretched the seams of that moment
a little further

by saying hello in return,
I felt enough.

You're trying to come to terms with who
you are, but it's difficult when your soul
is a tempest and the wind keeps changing.

Maybe fate is cruel or maybe we are too
optimistic.

Everyday of the week a new door seems to
close right before your eyes; loss pierces every
nerve in your body like clockwork.

Everybody has felt this way one time
or another, they say, you'll get through it, they repeat,
you'll survive. But when the end of the week blends in
with the arrival of the next, you swear that
hopelessness hasn't been everyone's shadow
as long as it's been yours.

And maybe you're right.

You feel so much that it's tearing
apart everything you love. So kiss
your sadness
goodbye
because that is the blessing and the
curse of being you.

You are not a torn up love letter.
You are just too good for words.

There are some things that can't be boxed
or labelled, actions and feelings so exquisite
that no language could do it justice.

But then you say it.
And I swear its a melody
and I would gladly be wrong
if this is the reward.

I think its unfair that people can only love
so much. They can love and love and love
but their hands turn to smoke
when they try to reach
too far, into the intangible mess of another's soul.

I know most people don't understand
how you can love so terribly like it's a war.

But I do.

And I will be the smoke that kisses your skin
after each battle.
We are all just moments
among the living, but you
are the breath of life
I fight for
even in my dreams.

You can taste
the psychosis on my
lips but there's no
guarantee that I will feel it.
There's an umbilical chord
holding me down to ***** reality
and depending on my
perspective
it either looks like a
dog leash or a
noose.

Inject a sedative with a rusty
needle at the end of my
nervous system. I'm immune; there's
misery mixed in with my
white blood cells that swallows
all sense of introspection. When my
soul plummets down like an anchor
and the floating stops
feeling safe, I welcome the chest
pains with open arms. The pins and
needles in my lungs are better
than burning them.

Look through my eyes
and sometimes nothing is real.
Live through my heart and
it hurts like hell when
I'm not drowning in air.
Think with my head and
either you will want to get out,
or it will kick you out.

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.

You can always tell a fake smile
from a real one
by the creases in the eyes. There's also
something about receiving and empathy
but I'm not sure we're there yet.
The seats on my shoulders
for an angel and devil sound the same
when I'm with you. You make me forget what's right
and that's so so wrong.
I'm going to glue my mouth shut
with spoiled honey to teach myself
that I don't need to give you excuses and
so you won't hear my rotten words.
I'll swallow an apology before I ***** out
another one. I've stopped looking for
forgiveness in the creases of your face,
cause you've just stopped smiling
entirely.

I'm trying to match
the beat of my heart with yours,
and I'm beginning to truly understand
what the basis of an abusive relationship
is like. We're nothing but porcelain
dolls
that have shattered into a million
shards, and glued back together into
a mocking semblance of "what if"...

Parts of our anatomy
are missing, now: hands, so that
we can't
hold one another, my cognitive
dissonance
so that I may never fully feel the handicaps and
disabilities
of You+Me.
But I can't
just leave.
You are a fraction of my soul.
I am an even lesser fraction of yours.

I should be afraid
of the fact that we've deteriorated
into nothing but shadows, fleeting
and haunting each other's heads.
But I am more afraid
that it's just me
who feels this way-
that I'm alone with your ghosts,
while you never
even saw
mine at all.

people remember not what you say,
but how you make them feel.
my words are not much, but
... they are all i have.

i've been cursed with possessing a perfect
memory. you are cursed with reading but
not understanding. or maybe i just can't
understand
how you don't care.

we are at once ill matched and perfect:
i remember both the syllables that fell
from lips, and the spirits they evoked...
while you remember nothing.

I'm getting tired of walking into brick walls
Wherever I go. This time when I talked to you
It didn't sting as much because I now know to shower
In acid before we converse. I don't mock you... Ever.
I have never laid a figurative finger on you,
Yet when I open up, even if it's just a small splice

Down the center of my chest, you swat away what I
Have to say like it's nothing but a pest. So, I will humour
You, since the only thing your low opinion of me does
Now is amuse me. I chew on your words, let them cut
The inside of my mouth like knives. Your look, your laugh
Resonate within me until I am thoroughly encompassed

By a magnified mocking so alive I can't tell where that
Image ends and I begin.

Console me.
I can't do it myself.

Pet me, make me feel like I'm alright.
I have no idea
what it's like
to feel
CALM.
I think I'm finally crazy. Look me in the eye, judge me
see the red rims
witness
my complete instability.

Even shame is too exhausting now.

Hold my hands so they'll stop shaking. If I look in the mirror
one more time
I might punch my reflection.
I'm ready to be alive now.

I am bad with fragile things.
I like the noise of glass crunching
into sharp shards
I like watching
skin rip like silk.
*I want you to love me more than I hate myself.

I don't know what I'm looking for
when I look into your face. Maybe
reassurance
that it's not just a mask.

I don't know what I'm writing for
when I pick up a pen,
except that I want
desperation
to make sense.

I'm beginning to think
I've either forgotten
how to sleep
or how to live.

I will write my secrets upon petals
and rip them up, bury the shreds
in the hallows of my ribs, and ****
your seeds of doubt in the process.
I will sleep till spring, so that when
I awake, maybe something besides
trouble will finally
bloom. Its heavy, my skin
soaked with stress
the nerves in my spine have electrified
and now my lungs are smoking
and crackling like a burnt fuse
and my heart ticks down
to the explosion.

Swinging in sync with the sunrise, your hair
becomes tangled with the clouds.
Grab a fistful of sunlight
and kick the top of the snowglobe sky
until the whole world can hear
your glass shattering joy.
But the thrill of free falling to the dirt
ground while skipping the burn of the crash
developed a dangerous mentality.
You practiced falling faster than shooting stars
above, like you were a lost rocket
not knowing what planet was your destination,
but sweating tears to get away from
childhood.
Mutiny of the mind and now you're trapped
in a new dimension of adulthood and reality.
Everything is strange and foreign and as you declare
that this wasn't your original mission
you realize that life is a one way mirror
and there's only death on the other side
to interrogate you. The sky is the same hue but the rain
falls colder and harsher and you no longer try
to catch the droplets on your tongue. You begin
to accept that tragedies and fairytales taste
the same, because stories can only have one ending.

As breakable as plastic wrap, one little slit
and out come my pink guts and colourful secrets
until it all pools at my feet, like some gruesome
flooded garden with rotting zombie flowers. But at least
it forces you to have nothing to hide, no more hidden skeletons
in this closet of a body, where I hang half-whispered dreams
in the hopes that one day, one year, I'll finally have the chance to put
them on for size. If you have transparent skin, too
you may realize that you've never felt this light before. Don't be alarmed,
the important parts inside you will regrow (a heart,
a soul, a spirit) and you can finally discard the things
you never really needed before (a conscience). You may
be falling apart at the seems. You may not know where your insides
end and your outsides begin, and you may inexplicably find
your heart duck taped to your sleeve in an attempt to
hold you together. But now that my truth has finally been exposed
to the air around me, I finally feel clean.

I will base our relationship
on what the stars say
because I have nothing else to go on.
It's all eggshells dipped in lighter fluid
with us, hot blood, ping pong pupils
that never know when to rest. When
we enter the same room I swear
I see sparks ignight in the static air.
There's blood behind our words
but I don't know if it was spilt in vain
or if this is all part of our story to the road
of forgiveness. Maybe I'm crazy
but I just want to take your hand
and make you agree that we are
both unwarranted.

Most days self-doubt laps at my ankles
in pools that I hardly feel, with ripple effects
so small I don't even sift the footprints
in the sand. Other times it comes in waves,
striking me behind the knees. I wobble,
skim the water's surface with a grasping hand
that's never held on to anything except for broken
secrets, but I don't fall. The salt stings my eyes
but instead of closing them I resolutely
gaze at the sunset in the hopes that I could find
some written metaphor in the pink and orange clouds
about something like "starting over" or
"self-forgiveness". And then there are rare days
when there's an eclipse and I can't blind myself
with sunbeams or use an ultraviolet floodlight in my brain
to scare off all the lurking thoughts I can't pin-point
but know are there... that's when the self-doubt
comes in tsunami waves, and I don't fall but
sink like a wayward torpedo, farther than
any reaching hand could pull me
to shore, to normal rock bottom,
and I realize, as the oxygen slowly leaves my lungs,
as my vision darkens into obscurity,
that I've visited this abyss before.

I've been stung by a wasp on the same part of my heart
so many times that this familiar
disappointment shouldn't hurt anymore.
Gardeners develop callouses on their hands
because nurturing others to life with love
is the hardest thing they will ever do.
I can show you the rough patch of tissue
and muscle, right on the epicardium; I've cut myself open
time and again for others to peer inside, that it has
become automatic, synchronized with each beat
and thump. I don't know how to become close
to people without bleeding for them, but none
yet have been able to withstand the sight of
a brilliant crimson geyser showering
from my chest. If day after day I continue getting stung,
suffering like Prometheus when the eagle tore at his liver,
I know that I'll get rescued like him, too. Only I won't
be looking out for Heracles and a centaur- just a person
with open, calloused hands.

To fall asleep tonight I'm thinking of last night's
dreams and tomorrow's nightmares all at once
like re-runs of the same television show aired years ago
by another person in another body, and I wonder
if they felt the distinct absence
of everything... a pain that has no source, but that can pierce
every nerve in my entire body until I'm screaming louder
than the ambulance's siren. At night we are all passengers
waiting for the sunrise's journey. And tonight I will think about
how the nurses feel when their patient dies
before they arrive at the hospital,
if they feel the pain that exploded from the victim's last breath,
if their ribcages feel just as hallow
as the ambulance itself is without anyone to rescue.
I flip on the television in my eyes, and suddenly
all I see is static.

my vision *****.
I see everything in grayscale
and no matter how hard i try, how hard I shake from the tear-inducing effort
I cannot help but feel chills
run down from the base of my skull to the bottom of my spine
when I look at the future from my angle,
from my eyes.